Routines

Senior · enrolled learners

This lesson opens with Eastern Air Lines Flight 212 and the sterile cockpit rule.

What happened

On 11 September 1974 Eastern Air Lines Flight 212 struck the ground short of the runway on approach to Charlotte, killing 72 of the 82 people aboard. The cockpit voice recorder showed the crew engaged in extended conversation on subjects unrelated to the flight, including politics, during the approach. The National Transportation Safety Board found that a probable cause was the flight crew's lack of altitude awareness, to which the distraction of that conversation contributed. In 1981 the Federal Aviation Administration adopted what became known as the sterile cockpit rule, codified at 14 CFR 121.542, which prohibits any flight crew member from performing duties other than those required for the safe operation of the aircraft during critical phases of flight, defined to include taxi, take-off, landing and all operations below 10,000 feet other than cruise.

The decision point

The remedy was not better attention, more training or a reminder to concentrate. It was a rule specifying what may not be done, during a phase defined by an altitude anybody can read off an instrument. Attention is not a thing you can instruct somebody to have. A prohibition on specific activities during a defined window is a thing you can check, and per R403-06 that is the difference between a control and an intention.

Orientation and Year One are open: anyone can read them without an account. From Year Two onward the lessons are for enrolled learners, because progress through the later years only means anything if it is tracked against a record.

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