Flying the Overly Friendly Skies

I was given a great bit of advice once, about how to keep a marriage on an even keel: Whenever you’re about to criticize your spouse, you should preface the criticism with: “I love you, but.”

“I love you, but this bread was not black before you put it in the toaster.” “I love you, but isn’t today garbage pickup day?” “I love you, but Easy-Off is for cleaning the oven, not polishing the dining room table.”

(It’s true that in our formative years as a couple, my wife actually did scrub down our oak table with Easy-Off, which lived up to its name. I love you honey, but I needed to divulge this to 1 million subscribers for the sake of this column.)

It turns out that this is a fine strategy for husband and wife. It makes complaining less personal and maybe has actually helped save a few marriages.

But for pilot and co-pilot?

A study in the Proceedings of the Ninth International Symposium on Aviation Psychology has found that co-pilots may be so loath to damage their relationships with their pilots that they actually may hold back from directly pointing out a mistake.

According to a Reuters story on the report: “Co-pilots on commercial aircraft use indirect hints to correct pilots who are making mistakes, even though those mistakes can be a matter of life or death.”

While this may be “collegial or polite,” Judith Orasanu of NASA’s Ames Research Center, which helped fund the study, notes that it also can lead to misunderstandings.

The most serious possibility is that the pilot might not understand that he or she is being asked to correct a problem.

“Problem statements may not be understood as a request to act,” says Ute Fischer of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Literature, Communication and Culture and who led the study.

I and the rest of the flying public probably can accept a piece of burned toast as an inevitable consequence of life on this planet, but I’m not sure we can live with the idea of some etiquette-obsessed first officer who is afraid to tell his superior straightaway that something needs fixing, and quickly.

It would be sad to know that you are going down in a jumbo jet because of a timid co-pilot.

“Um, Captain, that’s a great tie you have on today. By the way, they sure don’t make those flaps like they used to, do they?” Or: “That was one of the best takeoffs I’ve ever witnessed. . . . The importance of oxygen in the cabin is overrated, don’t you think?”

“There are advantages and disadvantages to being indirect,” Fischer says. As a passenger, I’ll be darned if I can find the upside of making the captain guess what might be wrong with the 50 tons of suspended metal in which I’m seated.

The report notes that captains, both male and female, give more than twice as many commands as first officers, and that case studies of airline accidents show first officers often must correct captains’ mistakes.

Still, co-pilots questioned in the study said they most often would use hints in addressing a pilot. Moreover, first officers in the U.S. were twice as likely as their European counterparts to hint rather than state the problem clearly.

None of us wants to risk offending the boss, which is why we editors often hear things like, “Great editing job. My story reads a lot better,” from reporters, who generally place us below the paramecium on the evolutionary scale.

All over the country, nurses are telling doctors: “Your decision to amputate is brilliant, but you may want to check out the patient’s OTHER leg while you’re at it”; store clerks are telling managers: “I’ve never been treated so well in any job. I hear that at some stores, they actually give you a day off every couple of weeks. Can you imagine?”

The problem with such sugarcoating, Fischer notes, is that “because [the] problem statements exert little pressure, the hearer may not take the speaker’s intention sufficiently seriously.”

At a newspaper, a department store, even a hospital, the consequences of indirectness, while possibly significant, usually do not result in the demise of hundreds of people. Within the confines of a 767, however, this behavior has to stop.

Co-pilot assertiveness training is called for. Let’s lock them in a big room and forbid them to go to the john until they walk up to a simulated pilot (it could be a doll, or Robert Stack) and scream things like: “Put those flaps down before you kill us all.” “If you don’t lower the landing gear NOW, you’re gonna need duct tape for your windpipe.”

Or: “I love you, but if you don’t give me control of the plane, I’m leaving you for Chuck at United.”