Safety in satire

I’m referring, of course, to Fielder’s surreal HBO comedy The Rehearsal, a show based on the idea that if someone can rehearse for daunting challenges—planning for and simulating every thinkable scenario—they’ll be more prepared to make the right decisions when confronted with the real thing. In the second season, Fielder poses a provocative hypothesis: The ego-driven behaviors of airline captains—specifically overconfidence and resistance to feedback—and the subsequent reluctance of first officers to speak up contribute to, or even cause, airline crashes.

To explore his theory, the comedian teams up with former NTSB board member John Goglia and orchestrates elaborate simulations, building 1:1 recreations of flight decks, pilots’ apartments, and an airport. He then obsessively role-plays scenarios based on transcripts from recovered black box audio, with herculean effort.

The depth and attention to detail are remarkable, but it’s a strange and dissonant juxtaposition of humor with seriously somber subject matter. Even if it makes you doubt Fielder’s sincerity, it’s tough to question his commitment. He spent over two years working his way through flight training, from private pilot to instrument and multiengine ratings, ultimately earning a 737 type rating. Fielder now flies professionally for Nomadic Aviation Group ferrying empty 737s.

Made you look

It’s not immediately clear which of Fielder’s challenges is harder for him to overcome: proving that inadequate crew resource management (CRM) training, specifically the FAA’s, played a role in some of the unsettling patterns he’s uncovered or effectively communicating his ideas to pilots, researchers, and regulators through offbeat, absurdist comedy on a meaningful level.

Although the evidence presented in the first episode is initially compelling, it just doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. So, when the credits roll, it’s fair to question whether this bizarre thread is worth pulling any further.

But it might be the most important thread you pull in your aviation career.

Fielder’s logic is flawed, but deliberately so—not to mislead viewers, but to frame a difficult conversation in a way that forces us to engage with things we otherwise wouldn’t have had much of a reason to think about.

Fielder wants us to take CRM seriously—to think of the “softer” human factors skills like interpersonal communication, decision making, and emotional intelligence not as peripheral to technical skill, but as core components of competency. If you were to argue that these are already taught as core competencies in training curricula, you’d be right. But culturally, outside the classroom, it might be a different matter in terms of how they are thought about and applied. Like Fielder’s approach, it’s less about whether the skills are taught and more about how they are taught and internalized.

Satire as a safety tool

Let’s address the red herring. Many of the crashes Fielder highlights involved pilots who were trained overseas, flying for non-U.S. carriers whose operations were not subject to FAA regulations. To be clear: The FAA’s training practices have little or nothing to do with accidents involving crew trained and aircraft flying under different regulatory standards. So, while the CRM breakdowns portrayed in the show are worth examining, conflating the accidents with supposed shortcomings in the FAA’s training practices is, when taken literally, reaching at best and at worst disingenuous.

But all of this is beside the point.

Fielder’s not really attacking the FAA. He’s using a familiar institution as a stand-in to deconstruct what he sees as a broader cultural failure. The dots don’t need to connect because, you know, it’s a comedy. Yes, the crashes are exploited on a few levels to serve Fielder’s needs, some of which are shock value, ratings, and streaming metrics: HBO will be looking for a return on what was presumably a mammoth investment. But Fielder’s primary focus is on how to successfully con us into thinking about what CRM is missing—con in the sense of being tricked into eating our veggies à la “here comes the airplane.”

Whether or not this method is problematic depends on the degree to which you’re willing to engage with nuance.

Radical experiments

Now that we understand Fielder’s chosen tool, we can look at how he uses it. No method is too bizarre.

To gauge first officers’ abilities to assert themselves in the face of stress and uncertainty, a pseudo music reality show (within the show) is created and run by commercial pilots. Their role is to judge and dismiss real contestants, who in turn score the pilots based on their social interactions. When one pilot shows notable skill in dismissing contestants while still earning high scores, Fielder digs deeper into what makes her successful.

In another segment, Fielder reenacts Sullenberger’s life, from cradle to Hudson River, in extraordinary detail, with the aid of oversized furniture and puppets the size of some general aviation airplanes, all to understand why Sullenberger was, unlike many of the captains in the transcripts, so open to ideas and recommendations from his first officer, Jeffrey Skiles, on the afternoon US Airways Flight 1549 struck a flock of geese and lost both its engines.

Together, these simulations aim to understand the qualities that enable some pilots to be assertive while also being receptive to feedback and collaboration.

The numbers

NTSB accident findings are broken down into multiple categories and subcategories to identify causes and contributing factors. It gets pretty complex, but in a nutshell, accidents related to cockpit dynamics, where ego may have been a factor, fall under aeronautical decision making (ADM), which factors in 16 percent of accidents involving aircraft flown under FAR Part 121 (think major and regional airlines and cargo operators).

In the grand scheme of things, that’s not a large slice of the pie. From 2008 to 2014, there were 419 accidents in the United States involving Part 121 operators. Of these, four had at least one fatality. Getting more granular, 68 of the accidents involved some form of “action/decision” issue, and these included “incomplete or incorrect action sequence,” “decision making/judgment,” and “unnecessary action.”

The problem we seem to run into is that ego may be too loosely defined to fit neatly into the categories used in accident reporting. We know it’s there—we see it play out in Fielder’s reenactments of the crash transcripts—but we don’t really know what role it plays, if any, in accidents tracked by the NTSB.

Rob Geske, AOPA Air Safety Institute senior manager of aviation safety analysis, notes that ego, as we might frame its involvement in ADM-related accidents, goes beyond just crew dynamics. “Ego is not just about challenging authority,” he says. “It’s how you assess your skills as a pilot.” Our definition is not only loose but also blends into other factors.

In any case, the sentiment among safety experts seems to be that the quality of CRM training and safety culture in the United States is high. I’m curious as to how our methods of collecting and categorizing accident data differ from those of safety investigation entities in other countries and how things like national culture affect authority gradients in the cockpit.

Hard to measure; hard to talk about

Ego is distinct from confidence, but both are abstract, elusive concepts not as easily measured as something like the height of an obstacle or fuel burn. Some pilots might struggle to understand the point of examining these sorts of incorporeal factors, but this is the very blind spot that Fielder is trying to point at. If we can’t accurately measure ego, how can we address it in a systematic way when it becomes problematic?

Fielder said in a recent CNN interview that the FAA’s approach to CRM training consists of “one PowerPoint slide” encouraging co-pilots to speak up. This is an exaggeration of course, but Fielder’s point is that the practical application of loose human factors concepts is easy to superficially summarize and gloss over in training.

Interpersonal dynamics are complex and nuanced, and if the aviation community is committed to improving CRM training, then it must be willing to tackle the softer, messier variables despite their ambiguity.

Eat your veggies

Fielder’s wild experiment shows us that we may need to go outside traditional boundaries to fix some of the intangible issues that are harder to get at in training. But we’re not used to thinking about aviation-related subjects in this way.

Whether intentional or not, The Rehearsal becomes a metaphor for exactly this shift in thinking.

We’re never offered any solutions and are left to wrestle with some important questions. Is current CRM training more symbolic than functional? Are we teaching it effectively? It’s all very nebulous—quite the opposite of the precision and clarity aviation typically demands.

But that’s the point. It’s not often that philosophical inquiry leads to concrete solutions. Rather, it lends itself as a tool for singling out points of deficiency and potential failure. In other words, it asks us to assess if there’s work that needs to be done. If there is, it’s not going to do it for us.

Fielder wants us to do the lifting, to go beyond the rote checking of boxes and think critically about our presuppositions. There is an endless river of online resources that can get you thinking a little more deeply about CRM—use them. If you find the material too academic, the challenge, then, is to shift your perspective.

No training—satirical or serious—can replace the individual responsibility we carry as pilots. We are left to our own devices in the cockpit, so we must self-assess, challenge our own thinking patterns, listen more when we feel certain, and assert ourselves when we’re unsure.

Have you ever hesitated to speak up in a cockpit? Tell us about it at [email protected].