Flight Deck Leadership and Authority Gradient

Every flight has one commander, whose authority is assigned by regulation, by rank and by the operator. Leadership is what the commander does with that authority: how the crew is briefed, how decisions are reached, how work is shared, and whether the other crew members feel able to say what they see. Accident investigations since the 1970s have repeatedly found crews that failed not for lack of skill, but because a concern held by one member never reached, or never moved, the person making the decision.

This article covers leadership styles and the Blake and Mouton grid, the authority gradient and the influence of culture, and the assertiveness techniques taught in crew resource management to make sure that concerns are voiced and heard.

Leadership on the flight deck

Leadership is the ability to get work done with and through others while winning their confidence, respect, loyalty and willing cooperation. It is not the same as authority. Authority is normally assigned, by rank, position or regulation; leadership is acquired and implies a voluntary following. Nobody is born a leader: some people are predisposed to it, but leadership can be learned and developed. The characteristics generally agreed to typify good leaders are social maturity, self-motivation, achievement orientation, self-confidence and communication skills. The leader is the chief communicator of the group, affects its motivation through his or her own behaviour, and is responsible for making sure its objectives are understood and achieved.

The commander remains ultimately responsible for every decision made on the flight deck, and in flight the commander's role in a disagreement is that of arbitrator, not negotiator. How the decision is reached still matters. Before a non-urgent decision the leader should avoid giving his or her own opinion at the outset, since a crew member with a different idea may be reluctant to air it if it seems to contradict the captain. Ideas are solicited openly, doubts and objections encouraged, and differences of opinion treated as helpful. Persuasion should rarely be needed: if airing the problem does not lead to a logical conclusion, the group is not working. Once the decision is made, the commander explains the reasons, after the flight if there is no time before.

Leadership styles

Human performance texts describe three types of cockpit authority gradient, each linked to a leadership style:

Competence changes how an autocrat is received. A competent autocrat is tolerated and often obtains good results. A low-ability autocrat may be regarded with derision, and there is a serious risk that the crew allows him or her to proceed on an incorrect course of action just to bring the captain down a peg, which is plainly unacceptable on a flight deck.

The statement that there is no place at all for authoritarianism in the air is false. In an emergency, when the crew is pressed for time, the captain must give crisp, clear orders for immediate action. Routine flight calls for synergistic command; the emergency calls for brief, decisive direction, followed by a return to consultation once time allows.

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The Blake and Mouton grid

Robert Blake and Jane Mouton's managerial grid rates a leader on two scales from 1 to 9: concern for production, meaning the task, and concern for people. The first figure gives the concern for production and the second the concern for people. Five styles are named:

The team management style (9,9) seeks results through participation, involvement and commitment, and confronts difficulties directly rather than smoothing them over. It is the grid's equivalent of the synergistic cockpit and of the P+ G+ interactive style described under personality and motivation.

Authority gradient

The cockpit authority gradient, a term traced to Elwyn Edwards and also called the trans-cockpit authority gradient, is the perceived difference in authority, status and experience between the captain and the first officer. It governs how easily information and challenges travel across the flight deck.

On the flight deck, status is normally shown by the number of rings on the uniform, combined with perceived ability and interactive style. Most people, faced with a decision from someone they see as higher in status, tend to listen, believe and comply. A dominant captain readily questions a junior first officer, but not the reverse: the junior has to be absolutely sure before voicing a concern. A steep gradient therefore silences the first officer. A flat gradient is no better, because nobody clearly leads and decisions are delayed. The captain's task is to keep a moderate gradient, retaining command without losing the support of the crew. Status and role can also conflict, as when a senior captain flies as co-pilot to a captain he or she regards as junior; handled unprofessionally, the tension escalates.

The gradient extends beyond the flight deck door. At Kegworth in 1989 many passengers and the three cabin crew members in the rear saw fire or sparks from the left engine of the Boeing 737-400 whose crew had shut down the right one. None of it reached the flight deck. The AAIB noted that cabin crew avoid interrupting a busy flight deck and that their training did not prepare them to pass on what they had seen, and it recommended joint flight crew and cabin crew training.

Culture and power distance

National culture shapes the gradient. Geert Hofstede's research identified power distance as one dimension of culture: the extent to which the less powerful members of institutions and organisations within a country expect and accept that power is distributed unequally. Where power distance is high, questioning a senior is seen as disrespectful, and in some cultures questioning a senior's course of action is considered unthinkable. Studies of status effects on the flight deck found Australian pilots the least status-affected, placing more weight on perceived ability than on rank.

Culture is not destiny, and CRM training under EASA's ORO.FC rules includes cultural differences among its topics. A strong remedy is procedural: standard callouts, stabilised approach criteria and a rule that either pilot may call a go-around turn a challenge from a personal act into part of the job, which works in any culture.

Assertiveness

CRM texts distinguish four communication styles. Supportive and assertive styles are positive; aggressive and submissive ones are negative. An assertive statement clearly states what is needed and explains why, without putting anyone down. An aggressive style focuses on the task or the speaker's own needs with no concern for the others, degrading teamwork. A submissive style shows little regard for one's own needs or for the task, and shifts workload onto others. Because pilots sit side by side facing forward, much of the body language people normally rely on is lost, so concerns must be carried by the words and by an assertive way of saying them.

Air Florida flight 90 is the classic lesson. On 13 January 1982 a Boeing 737 took off from Washington National in snow with engine anti-ice off, so iced probes gave false high thrust readings. During the take-off roll the first officer said "that don't seem right, does it?", then "that's not right", and later "I don't know". The captain took no action to reject the take-off, the aircraft struck a bridge and fell into the Potomac, and 78 people died, four of them on the bridge. The NTSB found that the first officer had voiced his concern four times, but that his comments were not assertive.

Advocacy and inquiry

Inquiry is asking questions to obtain information, test assumptions and understand another pilot's intentions, including questioning what the automation is doing. Advocacy is stating one's own view and recommending a course of action. The NASA team skill of inquiry, advocacy and assertiveness, used in CRM debriefing, expects every crew member to state recommendations and to speak up with appropriate persistence until there is some resolution. Inquiry works in both directions: a captain who asks for the first officer's view before giving his or her own is using it too.

Inquiry alone can stop too early. At Tenerife on 27 March 1977 the KLM flight engineer asked whether the Pan Am Boeing 747 was clear of the runway; the captain emphatically said it was, the take-off continued without a take-off clearance, and the collision killed 583 people. A question that receives a confident answer should still be pursued if the doubt remains.

PACE and the two-challenge rule

Graded assertiveness models give crews a ladder to climb. The best known is PACE:

• Probe: ask a question to understand the other pilot's plan, for example the intended speed on the approach.
• Alert: state the concern and the facts, such as being fast and high on the profile.
• Challenge: say directly that the situation is unacceptable and ask for a change, such as a go-around.
• Emergency: take the action, or take control, when the danger is immediate.

The two-challenge rule covers the case where the other pilot does not respond. If a pilot fails to respond appropriately to two clear challenges about a significant deviation, the other pilot assumes incapacitation, subtle or otherwise, and takes control. Subtle incapacitation is the more dangerous kind, because the affected pilot may still appear to be functioning. Taking control must then be positive and immediate. On Atlas Air flight 3591 in 2019 the NTSB listed the captain's failure to monitor the flight path and to take positive control among the contributing factors; only 32 seconds passed between an unexpected mode change and the impact.

The leader carries half of this responsibility. A captain who invites challenge in the briefing, answers it without defensiveness and debriefs on the principle of "what is right, not who is right" keeps the gradient where it belongs (see flight deck communication).

Library articles are written for study and exam preparation. They do not replace your aircraft's approved documentation, your operator's procedures or the regulations themselves.