1: “Inside the cockpit, alarms were blaring,” Charles Duhigg writes in Smarter Faster Better.
Qantas Captain Richard Champion de Crespigny looked at the display.
Twenty-one of the plane’s twenty-two major systems were damaged or completely disabled.
“Engine two was on fire. Engine three was damaged. There was no data at all for engines one and four,” Charles describes.
“The fuel pumps were failing. The hydraulics, pneumatics, and electrical systems were almost inoperative. Fuel was leaking from the left wing in a wide fan.
“The damage would later be described,” he writes, “as one of the worst midair mechanical disasters in modern aviation.”
Qantas flight 32 had left Singapore for Sydney less than ten minutes earlier.
An oil fire in one of the engines caused a large turbine disk to break into three pieces, destroying the engine. The debris tore holes in the left wing, some so big that a grown man could walk through them.
“Hundreds of smaller shards,” Charles writes, “exploding like a cluster bomb, cut through electrical wires, fuel hoses, a fuel tank, and hydraulic pumps.
“The underside of the wing looked as though it had been machine-gunned. Long strips of metal were bending off the left wing and whipping in the air.”
The pilots decided to turn the plane around to return to Singapore.
“For the next twenty minutes,” Charles writes, “the men in the cockpit dealt with an increasing number of alarms and emergencies.
“The plane’s computer displayed step-by-step solutions to each problem, but as the issues cascaded, the instructions became so overwhelming that no one was certain how to prioritize or where to focus.”
Captain Richard felt himself descending into a cognitive tunnel. He knew he had to fight his way out.
“One computer checklist told the pilots to transfer fuel between the wings in order to balance the plane’s weight,” Charles writes.
“Stop!” Richard shouted as a copilot began to follow the computer screen’s command.
“Should we be transferring fuel out of the good right wing into the leaking left wing?”
He quickly recalled a Toronto flight that had nearly crashed after its crew transferred fuel into a leaking engine.
The pilots chose not to follow the instruction.
Everywhere the pilots looked, “they saw a new alarm, another system failing, more blinking lights,” Charles explains.
Amid all the chaos, Richard leaned back in his seat and tried to picture the damage. He was “trying to construct a mental picture of the plane as he learned more and more about what was wrong.”
He calmly took a deep breath, took his hands off the controls, and placed them in his lap.
“Let’s keep this simple,” he said to his copilots.
“We need to stop focusing on what’s wrong and start paying attention to what’s still working,” he said.
The copilots began to speak up: “Two of eight hydraulic pumps still functioned. The left wing had no electricity, but the right wing had some power. The wheels were intact.”
They said they believed Richard could pump the brakes at least once before they failed.
Richard remembered the first plane he had ever flown, a single-engine Cessna with almost no computers.
“A Cessna is a toy compared to an Airbus,” Charles shares, “but every plane, at its core, has the same components: a fuel system, flight controls, brakes, landing gear.”
Richard asked himself, What if I pictured this plane as a Cessna? What would I do in that case?
Suddenly, the overwhelming complexity became simpler.
“That moment is really the turning point,” says Barbara Burian, a NASA research psychologist who has studied Qantas Flight 32.
“When Richard decided to take control of the mental model he was applying to the situation, rather than react to the computer, it shifted his mindset.
“Now, he’s deciding,” she states, “where to direct his focus instead of relying on instructions.
“Most of the time, when information overload occurs, we’re not aware it’s happening—and that’s why it’s so dangerous.
“So really good pilots push themselves to do a lot of ‘what if’ exercises before an event, running through scenarios in their heads,” Barbara notes. “That way, when an emergency happens, they have models they can use.”
By picturing the jet as a simple single-engine Cessna, Richard could focus on what was most important.
“Picturing it that way helped me simplify things,” he told Charles. “I had a picture in my head that contained the basics, and that’s all I needed to land the plane.”
Richard asked one of the copilots to calculate how much runway they would need.
He answered that they would need about 3,900 meters of runway.
“The longest runway at Singapore Changi was 4,000 meters,” Charles writes. “If they overshot, the craft would buckle as its wheels hit the grassy fields and sand dunes.”
2: The plane began its descent toward the Singapore Changi Airport.
“Let’s do this,” Richard said.
At two thousand feet, he looked up from the controls and saw the runway.
At one thousand feet, an alarm inside the cockpit began screaming “SPEED! SPEED! SPEED!”
“The plane was at risk of stalling,” Charles writes.
Richard glanced back and forth between the runway and the airplane’s controls.
He imagined the Cessna’s wings and gently eased the throttle forward, adding a little speed. The alarm stopped.
He lifted the plane’s nose slightly, following the picture in his mind.
“Confirm the fire services on standby,” a copilot radioed the control tower.
“Affirm, we have the emergency services on standby,” a voice replied.
“The plane was descending at fourteen feet per second,” Charles describes. “The maximum certified speed the undercarriage could absorb was only twelve feet per second. But there were no other options now.”
“FIFTY,” a computerized voice said.
“FORTY.”
Richard pulled back slightly on the stick.
“THIRTY.”
“TWENTY.”
A computerized voice warned: “STALL! STALL! STALL!”
In his mind, Richard pictured the Cessna still heading for the runway. He felt ready to land the plane, just as he had done many times before.
“It wasn’t stalling,” he thought as he ignored the alarm.
As the rear wheels hit the runway, Richard pushed his stick forward, forcing the front wheels onto the tarmac.
He knew the brakes would work only once, so he pushed the pedal as far as it would go and held it down.
The first thousand meters of the runway blazed by.
When they reached the two-thousand-meter mark, Richard noticed the plane might finally be slowing down.
“The end of the runway was rushing toward them through the windshield,” Charles writes, “grass and sand dunes growing bigger the closer they got.
“As the plane neared the end of the runway, the metal began to groan. The wheels left long skid marks on the asphalt. Then the plane slowed, shuddered, and came to a stop with one hundred meters to spare.”
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the lead flight attendant announced, “welcome to Singapore. The local time is five minutes to midday on Thursday 4 November, and I think you’ll agree that was one of the nicest landings we have experienced for a while.”
3: Investigators would later say that Qantas Flight 32 was the most damaged Airbus A380 ever to land safely.
“Multiple pilots would try to re-create Richard’s recovery in simulators. They failed every time.”
Richard and the co-pilots received a hero’s welcome.
“Today,” Charles notes, “Qantas Flight 32 is taught in flight schools and psychology classrooms as a case study of how to maintain focus during an emergency.”
Richard and his copilots had been building, testing, and revising mental models before they ever stepped onto the plane.
They were ready when disaster happened.
“It is cited as one of the prime examples of how mental models can put even the most dire situations within our control,” Charles observes. “Models help us choose where to direct our attention, so we can make decisions, rather than just react.”
The main lesson? Picture the situations you might face each day.
“Narrate your life as it’s occurring,” Charles writes, “to become genuinely productive, we must take control of our attention; we must build mental models that put us firmly in charge.
“When you’re driving to work, force yourself to envision your day. While you’re sitting in a meeting or at lunch, describe to yourself what you’re seeing and what it means.”
The goal isn’t to anticipate everything. It’s to keep thinking when reality stops matching the plan.
“Find other people to hear your theories and challenge them. Get in a pattern of forcing yourself to anticipate what’s next.
“If you are a parent, anticipate what your children will say at the dinner table,” he suggests. “Then you’ll notice what goes unmentioned or if there’s a stray comment that you should see as a warning sign.”
Captain Richard gets the last word: “You can’t delegate thinking. Computers fail, checklists fail, everything can fail. But people can’t. We have to make decisions, and that includes deciding what deserves our attention. The key is forcing yourself to think. As long as you’re thinking, you’re halfway home.”
More tomorrow!
___________________________
Reflection: When information starts coming at you from every direction, do you consciously decide what deserves your attention, or simply react to whatever is loudest?
Action: Before an important meeting, conversation, or challenge, picture what might happen. Then ask yourself what information will matter most if things don’t go according to plan.
What did you think of this post?
