“SULLY”: A Vote for Intelligent Humans

The eponymous movie Sully, directed by 86-year old Clint Eastwood, has Tom Hanks playing Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the hero-pilot who, in 2009, saved all 155 lives on board by landing an Airbus A320 on the river Hudson in the heart of New York. With engines having failed owing to severe bird hits, and there being no previous occasion when an aircraft that landed on water had survivors, this was a 21st Century aviation miracle.

On the surface, this movie celebrates Sully to satisfy Americans, who love their heroes. Hence the despair over the NTSB (National Transportation Safety Board) conducting an enquiry to pin some blame (pilot error) on Sully.

But, thanks to this enquiry, a very important facet, viz., human knowledge versus machine efficacy, emerges as a deeper point in this tale, and is very well highlighted in the movie.

With nearly 30 years of flying experience, Sully switches on the APU (Auxiliary Power Unit) fairly early after the engines fail, although as per the Airbus A320 manual, switching on the APU is listed as the 15th action in the sequence of ‘things to do’ in such an event. In the enquiry, this action of the pilot turns out to be a master stroke. In addition, computer simulations done by Airbus seemed to indicate that Sully probably had enough time to land at one of two available nearby airports. When Sully points out that humans do not make instant decisions like computers, the enquiry committee agrees to a 35-second delay in the simulated landings. With the delays factored in, crashes happen in the simulation, thus proving Sully’s decision to be correct.

With the advent of “fly by wire” technology, improvements in communications with ground stations and astounding strides in sensor technologies that can monitor every inch of an aircraft, flying has become safer than ever before. This has also resulted in a detailed, sophisticated and end-to-end dashboard in the cockpits of today’s aircrafts. The job of an airline pilot has become that much easier.

So has the job of doctors today. Technology has made huge strides in diagnostics, leaving you wondering how a non-specialist GP (General Physician) could ever ply his/her trade a few decades ago. We need to juxtapose this fact with another sobering development: the invention of fMRI, for instance, has resulted in over 500% increase in cancer-related surgeries. The incidence of cancer has not grown at that high rate.

With all the diagnostics possible, doctors today have far more data than they possibly need. The old-time GPs had only a finely tuned gut feel to fall back on.

The doctors of today are like the airline pilots in their dashboard-dominated cockpits. When inundated with data from multiple sources, the first item to go on holiday is human intuition. An analysis of the reasons behind air crashes over the last 20 years point fingers predominantly at the pilots' predilection to trust what they see on the instrument panels, despite contrary signals from the professional inside.

In The Moment of Clarity, authors Christian Madsbjerg and Mikkel B. Rassmussen say that we read people wrong because we believe that humans are thinking beings, and are fully aware of their intentions. However, human beings are social creatures, they point out, and we make up our intentions as our own understanding of the world around us evolves.

Sully strikes a blow for bringing back this balance between raw, lifeless data and human intuition. Despite all the access to, and suggestions from all the available technology all around, it was the knowledge and gut-feel garnered from Sully’s decades of flying experience that triumphed on that day. There can be no intuition unless you have had hands-on experience.

We are tortured by comfort-zone demands to stay on data, show proofs to be certain, and have facts to be definite. Questioning, being a work-in-progress and busy with an always-unfinished search are very basic human traits.

As Nobel Laureate economist Herbert A Simon states emphatically: “Information consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.”