[flipper35]

Originally Posted by Seahawk

I did a number of aircraft accident investigations.

Oddly enough, accidents like the one you mention generally fall into two distinct categories: Either boredom, inattention (routine/inexperience) or high workload/stress (already engaged with another emergency/lost comms/lost nav, etc.)

It is amazing what cues pilots will ignore. All military pilots are drilled incessantly: Aviate, navigate, communicate. In other words, fly the damn airplane first.

It is funny you mention ICU and aircraft. I also did a lot of operational flight test in the Navy which meant I dealt with a lot of human factors issues: Presentation of data to the pilot, keystrokes to get to primary pages (early glass cockpit stuff) location of switches, circuit breakers, etc. We did exhaustive "crew station working groups" in simulators, part task trainers, etc. in order to try and get the sequence(s) right to help avoid pilot error and streamline the pilot workload.

Every time I have been to an ICU (Mom/Dad, etc.) I am struck by how haphazard the flow is...to my untrained eye nothing seems intuitive. I also noticed that from hospital to hospital there was little standardization. As a systems engineer, you'd think that standardized procedures and ICU set up would be in place.

Best and good luck.

This was drilled into us on the general aviation side as well. The Air France flight 470 comes to mind and reading the transcript you can't help but wonder what was going through the junior pilots head the whole time. Sad thing is they had nearly 50k feet to recover from his first mistake.