The Mystery of a Virgin Galactic Pilot's Error

Acting Chairman Hart w/ Virgin Galactic pilot Todd Ericson & investigators at SpaceShipTwo accident site. Credit: National Transportation Safety Board Nobody knows exactly why Michael Alsbury, copilot of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, made the fatal mistake of unlocking a braking system too early during a rocket-powered test flight that had reached speeds of over Mach 1 on Oct. 31. The resulting disaster tore the wings off the futuristic space plane in mid-flight, killing Alsbury and forcing pilot Peter Siebold to parachute to safety with a shoulder injury. But the history of modern aviation accidents suggests that human error is rarely just about the mistakes of a single pilot. The fact that human error is responsible for a majority of aviation accidents does not necessarily mean pilots were being sloppy or unskilled. Such cases are usually less about "bad pilots" as they are about the human brain's common cognitive biases and limitations in certain situations, says Ben Berman, a 737 pilot for a major U.S. airline and a principal consultant of Berman Aviation Associates, a consulting and management firm focused on aviation safety. Berman coauthored a book in 2007 titled "The Limits of Expertise: Rethinking Pilot Error and the Causes of Airline Accidents," along with two former colleagues from the Flight Cognition Lab at the NASA Ames Research Center. By looking at recent aviation accidents, they concluded that individual pilot errors were often the unsurprising results of other factors at work. "If you put 1,000 pilots in the same situation, would you expect them to do the same thing or not?" Berman says. "In most cases, yes, you would expect people to make the same mistake."