We pilots tend to see ourselves as Type A problem solvers, and have an innate disdain for all that “touchy-feely charm school stuff.”Emotional sensitivity is for sissies—I’m Captain Kirk, dammit!
Enter Jean Denis Marcellin with his new book, The Pilot Factor.
A commercial pilot, Crew Resource Management (CRM) and human factors safety expert, Mr. Marcellin is constantly dragging us back to reality. He greys up our black and white world by throwing our “Safe operation of an aircraft” mandate against the the Human Factor filter. He challenges us to dig deep, go all introspective, and ask ourselves, Are we really flying this airplane in the safest possible manner—by taking the human condition into account?
Before you yawn, let me say that this book is chock full of fun, poignant, even whacky examples of said Human Factor that include such pop culture icons as Captain Kirk, Men in Black, and superheroes like The Avengers. In short, he’s my kinda pilot-writer! But the bottom line is the very serious subject of flight safety, and Marcellin dovetails the fun with hard lessons from real airline accidents caused by that most chilling of all aviation terms, “Pilot Error.” For example, how could three veteran airline pilots crash a perfectly good L-1011 over a simple, burned out light bulb? And how could a veteran 747 captain, flying with a brand new first officer, instigate the most deadly accident in aviation history?
What’s more, Marcellin sprinkles the book with anecdotes from his own extensive flying past. His stories are at once entertaining and enlightening. From an engine manifold fire inches from his cockpit seat to a desperate takeoff in a blizzard, Marcellin candidly shares what he did right—and wrong—as seen through the lens of the human condition. And that term, The Human Condition—what does that even mean? Well, it takes a whole book to explain, and kudos to Marcellin for doing it, oh so well. Not since John Gray’s, Men are From Mars Women are From Venus have I had my eyes opened to that which was always right before them: the reality of what makes people tick. Mars/Venus could be described as, “Relationships 101.” And The Pilot Factor? “CRM 201.”
This book is the cutting edge of CRM, and the forerunner of very important safety changes to come in the cockpit. The Pilot Factor delves far deeper than any rudimentary human factor training I’ve ever encountered in the airline industry. Picking up where the “Swiss Cheese” and “ABC” models—the mainstay of airline CRM—end, he takes us deeper down the rabbit hole of human factor. Using such cutting edge theories as the SHELL model, the four communication styles and even the “OODA Loop” used by the Air Force and Special Forces, Marcellin picks apart who we are, why we are and how we react, and compares it to those strange aliens around us called, “other people.” And when we throw these two disparate entities together in a cockpit and toss in a crisis for good measure—say, an engine fire—our true selves are revealed.
Fortunately, Marcellin takes us by the hand and using baby steps, leads us deeper into who we are. For example, he breaks down the “Four Different Types of People” into simple, understandable categories—based on bird types, no less (Eagle, owl, peacock, dove)—and enlightens us on how each type sees, communicates, and reacts to the world. We discover not only who we are but who others around us are in a new, profound light.
All of a sudden, when we deal with that engine fire with this newfound wisdom, we find ourselves acting and reacting in a much more efficient—and safe—manner.Thanks to modern technological progress, aviation safety has evolved by many orders of magnitude—so much so, that the weakest links in the safety chain are now the human pilots themselves.
Captain, I implore you. Do yourself, your crew and your passengers a favor: increase the safety level on your ship manyfold by reading Jean Denis Marcellin’s, The Pilot Factor.
When I stumbled onto Jean Denis Marcellin’s blog, planesimplesolutions.com, I was so impressed with it that I wrote an extra post for my own blog entitled, “My Favorite Bloggers”—with him as the headliner.
Mr. Marcellin specializes in the Human Factor side of flying, and in just a few posts I learned more about myself and how I “tick” in the cockpit than all of the countless CRM (Crew Resource Management) classes I’ve attended in the past 20 years.
In the past year, Jean Denis has become a dear friend. I now see where his colorful, humorous and insightful writing come from: a personality chock full of, well, personality. So, is this book review a tad biased? Perhaps. But, as I’ve learned from our human pilot factor guru Mr. Marcellin, every decision we make, from book reviews to takeoff runway selection, comes from the myriad jumble of stuff inside us that’s made us who we are.
Eric “Cap’n Aux” Auxier is an airline pilot by day, writer by night, and kid by choice. An A320 Captain for a major U.S. airline, he is also a freelance writer, novelist and blogger (capnaux.com). His second novel, The Last Bush Pilots, captured the coveted Amazon TOP 100 Breakthrough Novels in 2013. His newest book, There I Wuz! Adventures From 3 Decades in the Sky is now available in print and on Amazon Kindle. Mr. Auxier makes his home in Phoenix, Arizona.