Fear Turns Invisible

As a pilot, and as someone with a personal and professional interest in the emotion of fear, I was delighted to read the following in today’s front-page New York Times story about mayor Michael Bloomberg’s obsession with helicopters:

 Back in 1976, when Mr. Bloomberg was training to become a pilot, he nearly encountered disaster as he flew alone off the coast of Connecticut.

“I wasn’t sure what was going on in the engine compartment behind me, but I certainly knew I was falling and couldn’t breathe. I was going down,” he wrote in his autobiography. He landed on an island and ultimately put out the helicopter fire himself.

“Was I scared?” he wrote. “Well, there’d been no time for any emotion when I was in the air, and on the ground I was safe. So the answer is no — unless of course you count the internal shaking I couldn’t stop for the rest of the day.”

Funnily enough, a very similar story came up at a talk I gave just two days ago at my flying club in Poughkeepsie. I gave a brief presentation about the different kinds of fear that I’ve encountered as a pilot, and the mechanisms that underlie each. I said that I imagined that every single pilot has felt intense fear at one time or another, and that that was a good thing. Fear focuses our attention on what’s important and helps us to survive.

After the talk some of the guys shared their experiences. I found it particularly interesting that two of them discussed how they felt after unexpectedly losing engine power in the club’s Cessna 152 and having to make an emergency landing. Those stories brought a lump to my throat because apparently they happened quite recently. Last summer I took the plane on a long flight to Indiana and back, a trip of more than 1000 miles all told. I’d always assumed that the chance of losing engine power in a well-maintained, fully certified airplane was essentially zero. There were a few stretches along the way in which an engine-out would have put me in a dire predicament indeed.

At any rate, one of the pilots raised his hands and said that he while he thought there was a lot of sense in the points I’d made about fear, there was one major area where he thought I’d got it wrong: that we all naturally are bound to feel fear at some time or another. He said that he’d had one hair-raising flight that had the potential to go seriously wrong, and he hadn’t felt any fear at all. He just did what he had to do, and then didn’t feel any emotion at all until he was back on the ground.

“And how did you feel then?” I asked.

“Like I was going to keel over,” he said. Continue reading Fear Turns Invisible

Human Flies Like a Bird? I Don’t Think So

Gizmodo posted a pretty incredible story on March 21, 2012, entitled “Man Flies Like a Bird Flapping His Own Wings.” It claims that a Dutch inventor named Jarno Smeets has built and successfully flown a powered flapping-wing contraption. Accompanying the post is this video, which shows Smeets apparently doing a short run-up and then soaring into the air in an urban park:

My friend John Cook at Gawker alerted me to the story by Twitter, and asked for my input. My immediate reaction was: this doesn’t pass the sniff test. At all. For a couple of reasons:

1)  The machine that Smeets built is called an ornithopter — that is, it propels itself by flapping its wings. Ornithopters are an ancient dream, dating back to the Greek myth of Icarus, but have proven incredibly hard to pull off; it’s a matter of debate whether any human-carrying ornithopter has ever truly flown. I wrote about one attempt a while ago; you can read about it here.

2) Given the difficulty of the undertaking, it would be astonishing if this guy managed to eke out a small altitude gain. In contrast, he freakin’ soars. That’s a steep climbout. This guys has power and performance to burn. First time on a back-mounted ornithopter with a short wingspan and practically no visible powerplant? I doubt it.

3) Maybe a small thing, but: why do his friends run away from his flight path? Wouldn’t they want to see what happens, and maybe help him if necessary? (Look at where people are standing in those iconic photos of the Wright Brothers taking off). Also, why are they so giddily happy? He hasn’t done anything yet, dudes.

4) My biggest annoyance with this story is all the talk about how he linked together “an Android phone and Nintendo Wii controllers” in order to accomplish this amazing feat. To me, that’s a huge red flag: to rig a contraption this way would mean being incredibly clever to be incredible stupid. If you’re going to amplify human motion through power boosting — as the Pentagon has long been investigating, in hopes of building real-world “Iron Man”-type powered suits — the biggest problem by far is the issue of latency. Basically, the machine needs to correct its output virtually simultaneously with your altered input. Sensing someone’s motion using a Wii is a ridiculously complicated and latency-adding approach when you could much more easily do it the way engineers have been doing it in aviation for more than a century: using cables or push rods.

To its credit, Gizmodo has incorporated some skeptical takes in its updated version of the story. Still, the fact that it promoted this hoax in the first place is evidence of its credulousness.

UPDATE: The perpetrators of the hoax quickly gave up the game. In the aftermath, I interviewed a real, live ornithopter pilot for the Pop Mech website about why such craft are so difficult to pull off.

The Doorway from Impossible

On the 100th anniversary of the first flight by the Wright brothers, 35,000 people gathered at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to watch a replica of the famous first plane take to the air. Nothing had been left to chance: the $1.2 million reproduction was exact in every detail, right down to the thread count in the muslin that covered the wing struts. Yet the weather was failing to cooperate. When the hallowed moment came, it was raining—and worse, almost completely windless. At last the drizzle subsided. With the help of some of Orville and Wilbur’s descendents, the craft was maneuvered onto its launching rail. The pilot throttled the engine up to its maximum 12 horsepower and the replica Flyer set off down the 200 foot track. It didn’t get very far. Rearing up, it climbed about six inches off the ground and then slumped ignominiously into a puddle.

As 35,000 people learned firsthand that day, the Wrights’ “first airplane” was such a poor flyer that it barely qualified to be called an airplane at all. It only managed to get off the ground back in 1903 because there happened to be a strong wind that day. In retrospect we now understand that the Wright brothers made many wrong guesses in configuring their design. The propellers were in the back, instead of the front; the elevator was in the front, instead of the back; the wings angled downward, instead of upward. The plane was barely controllable.

Does that mean that the brothers’ first 12-second hop was an historical irrelevance? Not at all. The brothers did accomplish something epochal that day. Continue reading The Doorway from Impossible

What’s Your Favorite Mistake?

After my wife’s first month as an art director of a magazine, she signed off on her first cover. It was a major professional milestone, and a proud achievement – a gorgeous piece of work, as I can attest. She sent the image to the production team, who signed off on it as well, and passed it along to the printing plant. Only after the 100,000 copies of the magazine had left the printing press was the error recognized: my wife and the production had all forgotten to include a bar-scan code on the cover. Without it, vendors couldn’t sell the magazine. The distributors refused to send it out. Virtually the entire print run had to be pulped.

What my wife and her team had suffered from was a failure of prospective memory – the inability to keep in mind every aspect of a goal that one sets for oneself. If you’ve ever walked out the door in the morning and realized you’ve left your work papers on the kitchen counter, you’ve suffered a failure of prospective memory. This type of mistake is all the more vexing for being so common and seemingly avoidable. I’ve never felt so flat-out dumb as I did the day I locked my car keys inside the car. I’ll never forget that horrible feeling of shame, seeping over me like hot acid, as I realized that with a shove of the car door I’d done something that could not easily be undone.

And it’s a good thing I’ll never forget. Mistakes are things that we learn from. I’ve never locked my keys in the car since. And my wife has never sent off a cover that’s missing a crucial element. From that day on, the company instituted a procedure that demanded that staff run through a written check list at every critical phase of production.

Right now I’m working on an article about mistakes, and why we make them, and I’d love to include lots of vivid mistakes from all walks of life. Do you have a favorite mistake? That is, not to say one that you’d care to repeat anytime soon, but that has been burned so deeply in your memory that you’ll never repeat it? I’m not just looking for failures of prospective memory, but any screwup that’s left you feeling hot-faced with shame: a bad judgment call, a missed opportunity, an attempt to show off that ended badly. If so, please drop me a line, either here or on my Facebook page, or post it in a comment. You can be anonymous if you like!

If Mayan Prophecy Doomsayers Are Right…

On Dec. 21, 2012, the Mayan calendar will reach the end of a 394-year cycle called a b’ak’tun. In no sense does that imply that the world is going to end — the Mayan calendar cycle is no more momentous than our own calendar ticking over from 1999 to 2000. But that doesn’t mean catastrophe won’t strike. There are plenty of risks to life on earth, ranging from disasters that threaten millions or billions of people to an all-out “extinction-level event” that wipes out the majority of life on the planet. To understand the infinitesimally small—but nonetheless real—risk of planetary disaster, it helps to travel back in time. Because such events have happened before. And the results weren’t pretty.

To see the evidence, let’s take a trip. Start with a visit to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. On the fourth floor, just inside the entrance to the Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs, you’ll find a chunk of Montana dirt with dark and light bands layered like Neapolitan ice cream. Not very exciting compared to the huge creatures on display nearby. But one thin, grayish-beige layer might explain what exterminated these great beasts: It’s the impact residue of a 6-mile-wide asteroid that struck the Yucatán 65 million years ago. “In its aftermath we see extinctions of everything from single-celled organisms to the largest dinosaurs,” says Mark Norell, chairman of the museum’s paleontology division. Could another one seal our own fate? Or could some other extraterrestrial catastrophe bring us death from above?

Or maybe it could come from below. Twenty-two hundred miles west, in Yellowstone National Park, one of America’s most popular tourist attractions, is another ominous harbinger of destruction. About once every hour, the pool around the Old Faithful geyser explodes in a fountain of spray 145 feet tall. It’s a cool effect, until you consider what powers it: geothermal energy radiating up from a subterranean plug of magma. Every 500,000 years or so, the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts and rains lava and ash for hundreds of miles. An eruption 250 million years ago in Siberia may have released enough carbon into the atmosphere to cause the largest mass extinction in earth’s history, the Permian-Triassic, which wiped out 96 percent of all sea life.

In the cruelest of ironies, the gravest threat to human life on earth may be other life on earth—the microbial kind. Let’s turn our tour of all things apocalyptic to the Netherlands, where virologist Ron Fouchier at the Erasmus Medical Center recently synthesized an airborne version of the H5N1 avian flu. The lethality and frequent mutations of H5N1 make it a serious pandemic threat. The last big influenza pandemic, the Spanish flu of 1918, is estimated to have killed more than five times as many people as World War I. The possibility of a naturally occurring global outbreak is ever present, but the threat from labs is becoming more frightening. “The cost of synthesizing a new organism goes down every year,” says Dr. Ali Khan, head of the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “A bad guy could make his own smallpox.”

Although imminent destruction seems all around us, the probability of extinction in any one year is vanishingly small. Our long-term prognosis, however, is far darker. Very few species survive through the eons like the alligator and the coelacanth. “The safe bet is that we won’t make it, because 99.9 percent of things don’t,” says Timothy Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., an asteroid- and comet-tracking organization.

We’ve got some time, though. On average, vertebrate species stick around 4 to 6 million years, and modern humans are only about 200,000 years old. And we’re not your typical vertebrates. Our science and technology might ultimately migrate off this little planet altogether. So maybe we’re just getting started.

What are the 12 threats that could end life as we know it? Read the rest of my Pop Mech story here.

Facebook’s Fatal Flaw

Given the fact that Facebook just filed for a public offering of its shares which will value the company at $100 billion and make thousands of its current investors wealthy beyond imagination, you might be forgiven for thinking that Facebook is a wild success. That, and the fact that some 800 million people currently use Facebook, or more than 10 percent of the total world population.

But despite all that, I think that Facebook is failing.

Do I think that Facebook is going to go bankrupt tomorrow? Far from it. I’m sure that it will continue to print money for years to come, based on sheer momentum alone. (Hey, AOL still exists.) But if you listen to the way that people talk about Facebook you sense – or at least I do – that its cultural moment has passed. This is just based on a very unscientific analysis of my own very small circle of acquaintances, but once upon a time, Facebook was this awesome cool thing that you just had to try. Lately, all everyone seems to say about Facebook is “I don’t get it” or “I find it annoying but I feel like I have to go on once in a while.” Facebook, in other words, is heading the way of MySpace.

Becoming MySpace, of course, is the specter that haunts the nightmares of every Facebook investor. The company has been super aggressive in trying to avoid that fate by trying to metastasize into something grander than an automated blogging site, sending out tentacle everywhere in order to become a ubiquitous presence that binds together every aspect of the internet experience. They have striven for immortality through intrusiveness. And this, I think, will be their undoing. Continue reading Facebook’s Fatal Flaw

Why Your Brain’s Wrong About Danger

The world is full of potential hazards. Unfortunately, the things that we’re afraid of oftentimes aren’t the things that are actually mostly likely to hurt us. Our brains’ admirably lightning-fast danger-detection system evolved in an environment different from the modern world, so it tends to trigger our alarms when the situation isn’t really that grievous. Worse, it can fail to activate when we really are faced with a real-and-present danger, leaving us prone to walk right into potentially harmful situations. That doesn’t mean we’re totally SOL, however. With a little effort we can consciously arm ourselves with rational risk-benefit analysis and try to override our erroneous automatic impulses.

For example? Here are some perceived dangers that get blown out of proportion:

Cell phone radiation. Uncertainty is a powerful trigger of anxiety. When new technologies reach a broad public, they can seem uncomfortably mysterious, and hence ready targets for health-scare furors. Remember Alar, silicone breast implants, electromagnetic fields from power lines? In the case of cell phones, the word “radiation” adds additional emotional baggage. The fact is, numerous studies have failed to turn up any conclusive evidence that cell phone emissions pose health risks, and the physics suggests it’s most likely impossible.

Vaccinations. We tend to be less afraid of things that provide an immediate, palpable benefit. The problem with vaccinations is that we never really know if they’ve helped us or not. What’s more, we’re intuitively suspicious of things we perceive as artificial rather than natural. These biases have helped stoke widespread panic about childhood vaccinations, which in turn expose kids to very real risk. Continue reading Why Your Brain’s Wrong About Danger

What AF447’s Passengers Experienced

One of the more interesting responses to my recent Pop Mech piece on Air France 447 came from the Atlantic Wire, which took my description of the sounds and smells that the pilots experienced as a point of departure to discuss what the flight’s final moments must have felt like for those in the cockpit. Here is a photograph that accompanies the post, showing the electrical phenomenon known as St. Elmo’s fire. I’ve never seen such a thing in real life, but imagine that it must seem both beautiful and worrying.

Thanks to the cockpit voice recorder, we have a pretty good idea of what the pilots heard, and the instrument data gives us a pretty good idea of what they saw. But what about the passengers in the back? Their perspective was very different, so I’d like to offer a few speculations about what the final moments of the flight might have been like for them.

The plane had taken off from Rio de Janeiro at 7.30 in the evening, local time, and had been flying for about four hours when it first encountered the weather system that would precipitate the final crisis. It was nearly midnight, then, by the internal clocks of most of the passengers; a few were probably reading, or watching a video, while the majority were probably sleeping, or lightly dozing. The captain himself had just left the cockpit to go take a nap.

As the flight neared the line of massive thunderstorms straddling the Inter Tropical Convergence, any passenger who happened to be awake would probably have felt some light turbulence. Those looking out window would have watched the plane fly into a bank of clouds, then out into clear sky, and then back into clouds. At six minutes past midnight, one of the co-pilots made a call back to the head flight attendant, alerting her that the plane would shortly be entering an area of turbulence. He made no such announcement to the passengers, however.

The turbulence grew worse. In the cabin, the flight attendants would have been strapping into their seats. Continue reading What AF447’s Passengers Experienced

Popular Mechanics: How Panic Doomed an Airliner

On the evening of May 31, 2009, 216 passengers and 12 crew members boarded an Air France Airbus 330 at Antonio Carlos Jobim International Airport in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The flight, Air France 447, departed at 7.29pm local time for a scheduled 11-hour flight to Paris. It never arrived. At 7 o’clock the next morning, when the aircraft failed to appear on the radar screens of air traffic controllers in Europe, Air France began to worry, and contacted civil aviation authorities. By 11am, they concluded that their worst fears had been confirmed. AF447 had gone missing somewhere over the vast emptiness of the South Atlantic.

How, in the age of satellite navigation and instantaneous global communication, could a state-of-the art airliner simply vanish? It was a mystery that lasted for two years. Not until earlier this year, when autonomous submersibles located the airliner’s black boxes under more than two miles of water, were the last pieces of the puzzle put together. What doomed the 228 men, women and children aboard Air France 447 was neither weather nor technological failure, but simple human error. Under pressure, human beings can lose their ability to think clearly and to properly execute their training—a well-known failing that has proven all too difficult to eliminate.

Over at Popular Mechanics I’ve got a long piece offering a detailed blow-by-blow account of how one of the co-pilots of the Air France jetliner managed, in the course of just five minutes, to take a perfectly operational airplane from an altitude of nearly seven miles down to impact with the ocean. Here, I’d like to offer a nutshell summary of what happened, and what our understanding implies for the future of air safety. Continue reading Popular Mechanics: How Panic Doomed an Airliner

The Truth About Lies

In the ‘90s, psychologist Paul Ekman leapt to fame with his theory of “microexpressions”—the idea that when we lie brief, subconscious flashes of emotion register on our face to reveal our true feelings. People trained to pick up on these cues, Ekman said, can root out the truth with astonishing accuracy. His idea inspired a $1 billion TSA program and the TV show Lie to Me.

There’s just one problem. There’s no evidence that Ekman’s theory has any basis. “It’s hokum,” says Yale psychologist Charles Morgan III. While something like the microexpressions that Ekman described do exist, truth-tellers exhibit them as well as liars. “There is no clue, no behavior, that always means that someone is lying, and never means something else,” says Bella DePaulo, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who studies lying. “All of these behaviors are just hints.”

So can science help us unmask deception? Yes. But the key is not just to observe a suspected liar but to ask them the right kind of questions. Making up a story and keeping the details straight require more mental horsepower than just telling the truth. Researchers have found that if interrogators can place an extra “cognitive load” on a liar’s intellect they’ll likely push it to breaking point and cause the story to fall apart.

Dutch psychologist Aldert Vrij has tested several ways to accomplish this. In one experiment, he asked pairs of subjects to either go eat lunch together in a restaurant or to simply lie and say that they had. Vrij found that when it came to the kinds of questions that they probably expected to face—“what did you do in the restaurant?”—the liars were able to come up with such convincing stories that it was impossible to tell the two groups apart. But when he forced them to respond on the fly to unexpected questions, such as queries about spatial layout (“In relation to where you sat, where were the closest diners?’’), the liars gave up the game 80 percent of the time.

So if you want to get the truth, sit your suspected liar down for a chat and lay some cognitive load on them. Here are four proven techniques based on experiments that Vrij and others have conducted: Continue reading The Truth About Lies