Judgment…Can It Be Regulated?

Flying Safety, June, 2001 by William J. Smith

An anonymous quote found in AETC's Handbook 11-1, "Road to Wings," summarizes judgment pretty well: "We should all bear one thing in mind when we talk about a troop who rode one in. He called upon the sum of all his knowledge and made a judgment. He believed in it so strongly that he knowingly bet his life on it. That he was mistaken in that judgment is a tragedy, not stupidity. Every supervisor and contemporary who ever spoke to him had an opportunity to influence his judgment, so a little bit of all of us goes in with every troop we lose."

When you think about it, that's a pretty sobering comment to an audience whose jobs are inherently dangerous and require mass quantities of instantaneous judgment. But "human factors" have accounted for an average of about 69% of aircraft-related mishaps across the past ten years, with approximately 54% of the human factors aircraft-related mishaps involving errors in judgment. With this one item (judgment) identified as one of the most frequent causes of aviation mishaps, can we regulate it to decrease the number of incidents?

Webster's defines judgment as "The ability to make a decision or form an opinion by discerning and evaluating ... The capacity to make sound and reasonable decisions: good sense." I especially like the part about "good sense" because it seems to be lacking in people at times. But what this definition doesn't explain is how one goes about acquiring good sense or judgment. This is because judgment isn't something that can be taught through a definition, textbook or even a cookbook!

Judgment is a cognitive skill, learned during the on-going process of education and experiences throughout one's life. The Air Force mentors us by providing technical training courses to advance our knowledge and establishing upgrade programs to advance our skills. This, combined with experience developed over time, is designed to improve your judgment ability.

However, experience alone is not the sole qualifier for judgment. Everyone has seen an example of a highly experienced person making a poor judgment call. Numerous mishap reports and "There I Was" stories talk about pilots with "thousands of hours" or "doing it a hundred times before," making a bad decision. Or, on the other hand, a young second lieutenant making an input to the crew during a critical situation and saving the aircraft.

So this brings us back to the original question: Can judgment be regulated? The Air Force makes a valiant attempt to regulate judgment through written restrictions, operating instructions, and technical manuals, but does this really regulate judgement? Can it?

Taking a consensus of experienced pilots, it can be said that judgment Can't be regulated. So why do we have all those written restrictions and operating instructions? The best way to look at it is to view regulatory guidance as parameters, established to limit our choices that directly influence our judgment. In other words, until you acquire that breadth of experience over time that is helpful in developing judgment, the regulations and instructions are there to aid you and give you guidance. Even after you have developed a wealth of experience, the regulatory guidance is still there when you need it.

It's like a flow diagram kept in your head that you review each time a decision is made. By knowing what is legal, what the capabilities of your aircraft are, and what your personal limits are, you can more effectively make a good judgment decision when presented with a situation. Over time, the decision process becomes more intuitive as your experience builds, until one day you graduate from the "school of hard knocks" and are awarded a degree in "judgment."

After you acquire what you think is judgment, keep this quote by Mark Twain in your hip pocket for those times when you're just not sure which way to go: "It is better to be careful a hundred times than to be killed once." In other words, taking the safer course of action most likely will keep you out of trouble during those times when things just aren't going your way. So continue to build your judgment, work on your knowledge and fly safe!