
Ejection Decision (2016) - Tomte
http://www.verticalmag.com/features/ejection-decision/
======
YPCrumble
> More than one pilot being interviewed stated that his decision to eject
> wasn’t made in the heat of the moment. The decision was made years before,
> in training, after careful thought. “If I encounter these conditions, I will
> take this action.” These guys made their decision early. When they
> encountered the conditions they acted. Without thought. Without hesitation.

This is also good advice for making ethical decisions, especially when
situations or people in power suggest otherwise.

~~~
bartread
Not the first time I've heard somebody say this.

If you want to do the right thing under severe temptation to do otherwise (at
least consistently) you you need to have made that decision in advance,
otherwise the situation will overwhelm your ability to process it and make
good decisions. If you don't you're effectively leaving the outcome to chance,
or perhaps whether you ate a good breakfast that morning.

Also helps when dealing with difficult/angry/argumentative people, or when
you're arriving at work into what you know is a difficult situation.

~~~
sillysaurus3
A few examples would be illustrative. It's unclear how immutable beliefs about
moral judgements are a good thing. That seems like the basis of prejudice, for
example.

~~~
michaelt
Decisions like "I will not sleep with a woman who is too drunk to climb a
flight of stairs unaided" and "I will run rather than using this utility knife
in a fistfight" are much easier to make objectively when you're calm and
sober, rather than waiting until your blood stream is full of alcohol,
adrenaline and testosterone.

~~~
cookiecaper
Yeah this is basically the gist of it. In the heat of moment, at the apex of a
moral dilemma, it is likely that your body will have a lot of things operating
upon it, and a large cognitive load to track just to keep tabs on the
environment.

If you mix in the obligation to make an important moral decision, especially
one that sacrifices evolutionary benefit for abstract social benefit like "I
will not engage in a violent reaction when I feel offended" or "I will not
copulate with this apparently willing and attractive potential sexual
partner", well, we could say that it's likely that /usr/bin/moral_override
will time out and your body will default to the path of least resistance for
itself in that moment.

Thus, rehearsing for good outcomes in high-pressure situations is like tuning
a configuration file to ensure reasonable behavior in known potential failure
modes. You can hope that you won't hit the failure modes described (or you can
plan ahead, knowing you eventually will, which is the better option), but you
want to make sure that your system will behave appropriately when those modes
are encountered. Leaving the behavior undefined or trusting the defaults is
too risky for anything important.

------
JshWright
HEMS is one of the few areas of emergency services that is _actually_ a
dangerous line of work. It's on par with commercial fishing and logging in
terms of fatalities per 100,000 workers (as opposed to "regular" fire/EMS/law
enforcement jobs, which are safer than being a traveling salesman). I'd love
to do flight EMS, but it's not a risk I feel I can responsibly take with a
wife and kids (to put that into perspective, "crawling into burning buildings"
falls on the other side of that line for me)

A large majority of the fatal incidents are "scene" calls (as opposed to
inter-facility transfers), and stem from pushing past the edge of the envelope
like this article describes. There is also some sad irony in the fact that the
patients that are most likely to induce this level of pressure (those closest
to death) are also ones that are least likely to benefit from the additional
risk taken (i.e. they're gonna die anyway).

Around here the majority of scene medevacs are flown by the county sheriff's
office. All of their pilots are former military aviators, and are very, very
good at flying. I've watched them put helicopters places I wouldn't fly my
quadcopter for fear of losing it... Their skills have definitely made the
difference between life and death for patients I've handed over to their
flight crews. I have a lot of respect for what they do, but I also worry for
my friends that fly...

------
bartread
The training video linked off the article is also worth a watch:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa1Ba_NEobs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa1Ba_NEobs)

------
JabavuAdams
This reminded me how fascinated I am by disaster reports.

Into Thin Air got be fascinated with mountaineering, but the next few books I
got were all accident reports.

------
traviscj
We have a similar thing at work: if we're deploying, and start getting paged
for error rates, the default action is "roll back!" We explicitly _don 't_ try
to figure it out before we roll back or try some heroics to fix it or
whatever. Just roll back!

