Week 5 Sim Session: From report to rule

Read the primary sources and map each finding onto a phrase that now exists — or onto nothing, which is the interesting column

24 March 2027

Today you read the reports rather than a summary of them. Bring a laptop.

Before you arrive#

Nothing. The reading happens in the session on purpose — the point is to watch yourself read a primary source, not to arrive having already been told what it says.

In the session#

Forty minutes reading, silently. Half the room takes the SKYbrary findings and recommendations; the other half takes the ALPA human factors report. Read the findings, not the narrative.

Thirty minutes, the mapping table. Three columns, filled in as a room. One row is done for you as the worked example:

For each finding, does today’s phraseology contain something that addresses it? Sometimes yes and precisely — the reserved-word rule. Sometimes yes but only partly. And sometimes the answer is nothing, and that last column is the one worth the session.

Twenty minutes on the empty rows. A finding with no corresponding phrase is one of three things: something a phrase cannot fix, something a phrase could fix that nobody has built, or something the industry decided to fix another way — training, procedure, equipment. Deciding which is a judgement and you will disagree with each other.

The flight engineer’s challenge is the row that always ends up empty. There is still no standard phrase for I think the clearance we are acting on is not valid. Whether that is a gap or a category error is an open argument, and week 12 returns to it.

Where the two reports disagree#

They do, and finding it is part of the exercise. The Spanish investigation and the ALPA report weight the contributing factors differently, and ALPA has an obvious interest — it is a pilots’ association writing about a pilot.

That is not a reason to discount it. It is a reason to read both and notice that “the primary source” is not one document with one view, which is a habit you need for the transcript analysis in two weeks.

Afterwards#

Your mapping table is your own notes and is not collected. The habit it builds is the one the week 7 assessment marks: name the deviation against a specific standard, or admit there isn’t one.

If this week is difficult#

583 people died in the sequence we are reading, and some of it is in their voices. If you would rather not be in the room for the audio in the week 5 lecture, that is entirely reasonable — tell Noor beforehand or just leave. No explanation needed and nothing is assessed on attendance.