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MY 2 CENTS WORTH PLATO’S CAVE By Randy Mains


I attended the U.S. Helicopter Safety Team (USHST) HAI Symposium at Heli- Expo in Louisville entitled “Safety and the Bottom Line” and learned that in the team’s accident analysis, it was revealed that 84% of accidents included a Standard Problem Statement of “Pilot Judgment & Actions.” Good crew resource management practices seemingly would ‘cure’ that malady. So why haven’t they? The answer lies in Plato’s Cave.


Having flown for three decades overseas, I was reminded of the expatriate’s corollary to the allegory of Plato’s Cave. The cave, in my case, represents America. Here is how the corollary goes: Imagine a community living in a cave where all of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs is met; biological, physical, and emotional. Imagine further that you’re a member of that community wondering what might be outside the cave. You ask your friends what they think and they reply, “Why do you care what’s outside the cave? We’ve got everything we need right here.”


You gaze up to the opening at the top of the cave and pause for a moment to ponder their reply. “But there might be something better up there,” you think out loud.


They laugh. “How could it be better than what we have right here?”


One night you decide to find out, so you ‘escape’ from the cave and quickly discover a whole new and exciting world out there.


You witness a new paradigm, a new way of doing things, different from anything you’ve done or seen in the past, and much, much better than the way things are done back in the cave.


You’re eager to return to share this new- found knowledge. To your great surprise and disappointment, you’re ridiculed, scorned, and scoffed at for even suggesting change. The community is loath to alter the status quo because of self-interest and apathy, but primarily due to ignorance.


I left the American cave in December 1984 to accept a job when the Royal Oman Police hired me to set up a countrywide helicopter air ambulance program. I quickly came to realize that if the same practices, procedures, and attitudes I saw flying with former military British pilots (who had all flown hard IFR on the North Sea) were adopted and followed back home using effective CRM, the helicopter accident rate in America would plummet.


The lessons I learned flying in Oman were reinforced when I flew as a helicopter air ambulance (HAA) pilot for the King in Saudi Arabia for three years with several


British pilots, operating a twin-engine, 20-place, Bell 214ST off the king’s 500- foot yacht. Then my beliefs were further cemented with 10 years of flying for Abu Dhabi Aviation with airline transport pilots from 20 countries.


While outside the cave for those 30 years, I was a flight examiner as well as a certified CRM assessor in the two-crew cockpit and attained my CRM ground Instructor certification from Global Air Training in Cheshire, England.


What I learned is that for CRM delivery to ‘work’ it must be presented by a trained facilitator. Being trained is important because CRM is very much concerned with attitudes and behaviors. Most adults do not like being instructed in how to behave and what to think because attitudes and behaviors are based on a person’s past experiences, values, and beliefs, which vary from person to person. Therefore, telling people to behave differently carries the implication that their values and beliefs are wrong, and this is not convincing. People generally behave in a way that they think is rational, and often find it easy to justify their behavior to themselves and others. What they may not be aware of, however, is the effect their behavior has on other people or the safety of the operation; an alternative


10


Jan/Feb 2019


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