Remember back to the end of August, when a B-52 flew from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, with six nuclear-tipped missiles under the wings? There was much gnashing of teeth from the US Air Force and a promise of a thorough investigation, which came out yesterday.
Seventy Air Force members are involved, receiving everything from a boot up the arse, to being relieved of command, which is appropriate enough. Buried in the story from AP is this quote, regarding the protocol (called a schedule) of handling the actual nuclear warheads: "The airmen replaced the schedule with their own "informal" system, he said, though he didn’t say why they did that nor how long they had been doing it their own way." That is the truly scary part.
Humans are lazy at the best of times and that is a well-understood behavior. Repetitive tasks do not get our full, thorough attention, even if the potential for injury and death with the task is well known and recognized.
As an example, driving your car: Do you check behind the vehicle, along side the vehicle or in front of your car before you get in? Do you check tire pressures, oil level, brake fluid, power steering fluid level, coolant level and concentration, fuel quantity and percentage of water in the fuel before you get in and drive off?
Do you test and document the condition of all door latches, airbags, seatbelts, internal warning lights, window defogging heaters and fans, mirrors and instrument lights? You should also test the operation and condition of all surfaces, external lights, signals and braking system too, by the way. And the fire suppression system. You have one in your car don’t you?
We are talking about a ton or more of steel that can travel at more than 88 feet per second and can easily kill a passerby. Plus it contains many liters of highly-flammable, known-carcinogenic fluid, flammable interior components, glycols, and hydraulic oil that are bad for the environment, toxic if burned and, in the case of the Hula Girl ornament on your dashboard, in damned poor taste.
Imagine if you had to, by law, do a checklist of all those items above, plus more, sign it off, present it to someone, get it signed off by a third party, then be allowed to drive to the supermarket to buy a bag of pretzels.
If you want to come back home from the supermarket, you have to do the same checklist and signoffs again to be cleared to come home with the pretzels, which must be weighed and stored securely in a documented place in your car.
If you’re driving, you get in, do up the seatbelt, crank it over, find Drive, punch your radio station of choice and go get some pretzels.
Technically, to get pretzels with an aircraft, the long checklist would apply. I’m being very light on the number of steps, leaving out weather, navigation, clearances and maintenance.
That level of repetitive tasking is common in aviation, which explains why the aviation industry has studied how humans pay attention. This also explains why aviation has checklists that you work through to do things: Humans will cut corners.
To come back to the Air Force and the ‘informal’ schedule of handling the nuclear warheads at Minot AFB, it is perfectly understandable, from a behavioral standpoint. However, the US Air Force has existed since 1947 and as the US Army Air Force since, oh, 1917, give or take. It is an organization with a long history in researching, observing and understanding how humans work with checklists and repetitive tasking.
Here’s the real problem. If you document everything with a lengthy checklist and precise steps to perform the tasks, the humans involved will do it faster, cut corners, or not pay attention. Invariably, at some point, a human will skip one step too many, or assume someone else did their part and not check.
When it comes to handling nuclear warheads, there is no step that can be skipped, glossed over or, to use the slang, "pencil-whipped" by an inspector.
Now, how to fix it? There is a simple way: Change the checklist. Change the layout, or the colour of the paper it is printed on, or the way the checklist is signed off. That difference from what was done before, clues our lazy brains into paying attention again. We look at the words, or steps, or kill your parents satan is king, check boxes on the list and actually read or recognize what we are reading.
How many of you caught that little misstep in the paragraph above? Go read the "Now, how to fix it?" paragraph again. Anything seem odd about it? Anything seem like a non-sequitur? This posting, by the way, is something you have never seen before. It is new to your brain and eyes and you might have missed something odd about the previous paragraph.
The US Air Force should have known that humans don’t pay attention at the best of times and done things that would work around the human nature problem.
There is no excuse for six nuclear warheads to wind up on pylons without everyone involved knowing they were there.
(My personal bet, is that half the people who read it, will miss the reference to satan. I am kidding about the sentiment, but let me know if you did miss it the first time please.)
RoadDave 