Flying Inside the Envelope


If you are reading my column you may be wondering if I will ever touch on the chemical and physical “facts” regarding climate change. Fair question!! If you want to get ahead of me, you can download a booklet written by the two top scientific organizations in the galaxy. The booklet is called, “Climate Change Evidence and Causes”. These two are our National Academies of Science and the Royal Academy. *

But, why do I not give you facts right now. Quite simply I must convince people that facts are important. If you are committed to an opinion based on an inflexible political position, our scientist’s facts have been painfully gathered in vain. It is called the “Backfire Effect”. The backfire effect simply states that if you have an opinion based on a tribal/political principle, the more facts I present you, the more inflexible you become.  This, as you might guess, makes my work difficult.

So, I am trying very hard NOT to give you facts. This goes against my military and civilian aviation training. Our military and our Federal Aviation Administration make every effort to be data and science driven organizations. It does not take long, when you serve, or are regulated by these organizations, to see that engineers, scientists, and test pilots have plotted and graphed out exactly what an aircraft can and cannot do.  There are plenty of graph lines that tell you how to efficiently fly your craft. And, the manuals are quite explicit telling you that if you fly an aircraft too slow, too fast, too heavy, or too high you can expect to lose control, experience structural damage, or worse.  In helicopters we have graph called the height-velocity curve. No one calls it that. It is called the “Deadman’s Curve”. 

When we fly on the safe side of these lines, the limitations set by scientists, we call this flying inside the envelope. If you stay inside the flight envelope life is good. So why do we sometimes stray outside these envelopes?

All of us have a human envelope of physical limitations, knowledge, habits, prejudices, and psychological biases. These human limitations, if ignored, can be dangerous. Both the FAA and the Military have focused their safety efforts on teaching pilots and crews and ground teams about themselves and how we can effectively think as individuals and how to act and communicate as a team. This effort has paid off well and now, “Human factors “is common and respected term. Human factors, for all practical purposes, equate to psychology.

Now let’s imagine that you and I had an airline that did not accept scientific fact. That is, we ignored truth and accepted lies.  Or, within the airline we did not respect honest communication?  How long would we survive?

What if we have citizenry, in our country, that ignore science and speak disrespectfully of scientists? Can such a nation or world get from A to B safely? 

Generally, those who disregard science do so because their identity and social status is created by their groups. This process is known “Identity-Protective “cognition. 

Because we are diverse culturally we lean toward tribal opinions to form our opinions. With one awful exception, we as a nation have opted to overcome our tribal prejudices and, in the interest of the common good, make well-reasoned decisions.  Unfortunately, many of us have decided to pitch our tents in one camp or another based on …I am not exactly sure what.  The last tragic time we did this, in mass, was prior to our Civil War.

You can see from history and from science that this “Identity-Protective” way of opinion creating can put us on the wrong side of the Deadman’s Curve. Asking people to consider first how they think, to beware of false information, and how to communicate and act as a team is our first goal as a climate activist. Our hope is that we can convince our citizens that climate change is, or should be, a uniting point of focus. It can be an example of how we can come together no matter how diverse our backgrounds.  Solving this problem could be an example o f how we can move forward on a myriad of national and international problems.  

Maybe the process of thinking about how we think is more important than, well, facts!
*Booklet: Go to the National Academies of Science. Search “Climate Change Evidence and Causes”, or direct: www.nasonline.org/.../sackler-forum-2014-climate.pdf
 
Call me if you want me to mail you a hard copy: 906-285-3702

Human factors in aviation search: "faa" human factors dirty dozen site: www.faasafety.gov

Entertaining science, data, culture, and aviation movies: “Apollo Thirteen”, “Sully”, “Hidden Figures” 

Citizensclimatelobby.org

Greyson Morrow

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