Hazardous Attitudes

Hazardous attitudes are five habitual ways of thinking that lead pilots to poor decisions: anti-authority, impulsivity, invulnerability, macho and resignation. Each is paired with an antidote, a short, memorised statement that counters it. The idea is simple: a pilot who can recognise the attitude in his or her own thinking, in the words it uses, can replace it with the antidote before it becomes an action.

The model comes from FAA aeronautical decision-making training and is set out in the Pilot's Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge and Advisory Circular 60-22. It is a staple of the FAA knowledge tests and is also used in the EASA Human Performance and Limitations (040) syllabus, where some texts call the five the dangerous attitudes. Attitudes are only part of the story. As experience grows, overconfidence and complacency become threats in their own right, and the article ends with them.

Attitudes and behaviour

In psychology an attitude is a learned predisposition to respond favourably or unfavourably to something: a rule, a type of risk, a group of people. It differs from personality, the set of stable behavioural characteristics that is largely innate. Attitudes are learned and can therefore be changed by training and experience; there is no real evidence that they are inherited. Behaviour, what a pilot actually does, is the outward result of both, and it is chosen: whatever a pilot's personality, he or she can decide how to act.

That distinction is the basis of hazardous attitude training. It does not try to change who a pilot is; it teaches the pilot to catch a pattern of thought in time. Human factors texts also note that the most important personality trait for effective crew decision-making is stability, which helps a pilot resist impulsive choices under operational stress.

The five hazardous attitudes

Each attitude has been identified as a contributing factor in accidents and incidents. They often appear together, and they are strengthened by external pressure: a pilot at the final approach fix, with the weather at minimums, little fuel for a diversion and passengers late for a wedding, who thinks "I've done this a hundred times", is hearing invulnerability amplified by get-there-itis (see cognitive biases).

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Anti-authority and impulsivity

Anti-authority is resentment of being told what to do. Rules, regulations, procedures and ATC instructions are seen as unnecessary, or as meant for other people. Examples are a charter pilot who dismisses the operator's contingency fuel requirement as office paperwork, a private pilot who calls the alcohol and rest guidelines bureaucratic over-caution, or a pilot who mutters that wake turbulence spacing is for people who cannot fly and asks for an immediate departure. The attitude is common among experienced pilots who have got away with short cuts. Its danger is that procedures usually encode experience the individual pilot does not personally have, much of it learned from other people's accidents. The antidote, "follow the rules, they are usually right", does not forbid questions: querying a procedure through the proper channels, or challenging an unsafe instruction, is legitimate. Resenting the rule and acting on the resentment is the hazard.

Impulsivity is the urge to act at once, doing the first thing that comes to mind rather than the right thing. It is most dangerous where the correct actions already exist on paper. A pilot going around from a non-precision approach in cloud who turns immediately towards where he believes the holding fix lies, without checking the chart or the briefed missed approach, "because he had to do something straight away", is showing it. The antidote is "not so fast, think first", applied after first flying the aircraft. Trained memory items are not impulsivity: they are prepared responses, and the stimulus is cross-checked before they are used.

Invulnerability and macho

Invulnerability is the belief that accidents happen to other people. It usually grows from a record without incident, which the pilot reads as immunity when it is evidence only of favourable odds so far: "nothing serious has happened in 1,800 hours of night freight, so it won't happen tonight." Its most visible effect is that it removes the motivation to prepare. A pilot who leaves the lifejackets behind for a flight beyond gliding range of the coast, because engine failures happen to others, has decided the emergency will not come. The antidote, "it could happen to me", reconnects the statistics to the individual and restores the reason for planning.

Macho is the urge to prove oneself, to the passengers, to other pilots or to oneself, by taking risks. It shows in low flying for an audience, in accepting a crosswind or a weather minimum simply because someone else did, and in reluctance to turn back in front of others. It often travels with peer pressure. The antidote is "taking chances is foolish". In a multi-crew aircraft, macho behaviour by one pilot is a reason for the other to speak up; in a group, the same urge can feed risky shift, the tendency of groups to choose bolder courses than their members would alone (see crew resource management).

Resignation

Resignation is the belief that one's actions will not change the outcome. The resigned pilot gives up, leaves things to luck, or leaves the decision to others, and may go along with unreasonable requests to avoid conflict. It appears both in emergencies, when a pilot stops trying to find a solution, and on the ground, when a pilot accepts a flight he or she should decline because "there's nothing I can do about it".

Resignation is dangerous because almost every emergency has some response that improves the outcome. Human factors guidance for managing stress on the flight deck ends with the rule never give up: there is always a suitable response. The antidote is "I'm not helpless, I can make a difference", followed by the first useful action: fly the aircraft, then work the problem.

Antidotes

The technique taught by the FAA has three steps: recognise the hazardous thought, label it as hazardous, and state the corresponding antidote before acting. The words matter. Each attitude has a recognisable voice, and a pilot who hears "don't tell me" or "it won't happen to me" in his or her own head has a cue to stop. Saying the antidote, aloud or silently, interrupts the thought and gives the rational part of the decision time to work.

The antidotes are most effective when combined with decisions made in advance. Personal minimums, diversion criteria and go/no-go rules set on the ground give the antidote something concrete to point to (see aeronautical decision-making). In a crew, hazardous attitudes are often easier to see in a colleague than in oneself, and CRM gives the other pilot both the right and the duty to say so.

Overconfidence and complacency

Overconfidence is an unjustified belief in one's own ability or in the soundness of a plan. Human factors texts list it among the causes of errors of knowledge-based behaviour, alongside incomplete mental models, lack of situational awareness and confirmation bias. It shades into invulnerability and macho, but it needs no bravado: a quietly overconfident pilot simply stops checking.

Complacency is the self-satisfied state that follows, in which a pilot no longer expects problems and so no longer looks for them. It grows from routine and from long periods in which nothing goes wrong. It also has an automated form: automation complacency, over-reliance on automation whose classic symptom is passive monitoring, the tendency to leave it to the computer (see flight deck automation). Complacency shows as a slower scan, abbreviated checks, and routine violations, short cuts such as an omitted checklist or mass and balance calculation that become normal precisely because nothing bad happens, until the day the missing margin is needed.

The deterioration effect

The deterioration effect links experience, overconfidence and declining skill. As a pilot gains hours, confidence grows; overconfidence breeds complacency; complacency removes the motivation to practise and to keep learning; and performance, no longer maintained, can only deteriorate. Human factors texts use the effect to explain why general aviation pilots with between 1,000 and 3,000 flying hours have a higher accident rate than less experienced pilots. Lack of practice, the same deterioration effect, is also listed among the internal factors that cause errors.

The countermeasures are unglamorous. Regular practice of the manoeuvres and procedures that are rarely needed, recurrent training taken seriously rather than as a formality, and an honest self-critique after each flight, what went well, what did not and why, keep skill and judgement from drifting. Reviewing personal minimums after a period without flying, and treating each flight as a fresh go/no-go decision, keep the invulnerability that experience can bring in check.

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.