ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to find commonalities among the deep structure of the accidents. Plan continuation bias was very probably at play in the some accidents involving deviation from explicit guidance. An analysis of the accidents that occurred in challenging conditions reveals that many aspects of crew performance are sometimes affected. They are manual control of the aircraft, monitoring the status of the aircraft, identifying hazards and errors, decision-making, and intervention by first officers and flight engineers. The higher probability of error in challenging situations, and the tendency for these situations to snowball, increases the risk of accidents occurring. Three of the accidents challenged the crew to recover from an upset attitude: in one case, a spiral dive, in another, a stall, and in the third, windshear. Inadvertent slips and oversights occurred in routine situations that pilots would not consider challenging. The airline industry is starting to recognize the importance of monitoring as a defense against threats and errors.
