Patrick Boyd
speaker
48 appearances
9 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Jun 2025
Patrick Boyd’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Time for your coffee IV drip.
Radar contact lost. We lost our radar.
We're on a culinary journey.
Because Nathan Fielder, the actual person, while not making people laugh, one of his hobbies is reading accident reports. He got obsessed with this Canadian TV show called Mayday, which looks at all these different crashes throughout history and what caused them. On a cold day in northern Ontario, a passenger jet is unable to climb above the trees.
And he noticed a trend, which is a real actual thing, which is that there are failures of pilots and co-pilots to communicate.
He believes that this... this aspect of what's called CRM, crew resource management, in the field needs to be improved. Training needs to be improved. And that this will help aviation safety. Crew resource management is the idea that a flight crew is more than the sum of its parts.
It's not just a captain doing the captain's job and the first officer doing the first officer's job, but the interaction between them is really important.
and the field really got its wings as you could say back in the 70s when there was a still to this day the most fatal air accident that ever happened where these two 747s heavily laden with tourists were maneuvering around in the fog at tenerife airport in the canary islands One was about to take off.
The other one had not yet left the runway, but the first one couldn't tell because it was so foggy. And the first officer, as they're about to take off, the first officer says, I don't think the runway is clear. And the captain's like, yeah, we're good. And they take off and they hit the other plane. And hundreds and hundreds of people died. And so it was realized, well, the problem is that
Somebody on the flight deck understood that there was a potentially major problem, but they weren't able to communicate it to the person who was in the controls of the aircraft at that time. So you had a lot of people talking about this thing. People in the industry started really taking it more seriously. Now CRM is mandated as part of the training. And Nathan talks about it in the show.
He feels that even though it's mandated, it isn't sufficient. They don't really do a very good job.
So Nathan's argument is that there's a big difference between being told something in a PowerPoint presentation or reading it in a book or your teacher telling you about it in a classroom. There's a big difference between that and actually doing it in the cockpit.
There's a whole field. It's a small field, but it's a field of academic study of this particular subset of CRM where people talk, it's called safety voice. Britain and Europe have different equivalents of the FAA, but they both require a significant amount of time spent getting certified in a particular skill called MCC, which stands for multi-crew cooperation.
And the idea is that when you learn how to fly, you're flying alone, and then when you start to become an airline pilot, you're now in this situation where you have to cooperate. And as I said, the flight crew is more than the sum of its parts. You have to learn how to deal with this other person and work cooperatively, share the information that you need to share, listen, speak, all that.
And so they have a whole course that's devoted just to that and involves a lot of simulator time. So they're pretty much doing, you could argue, exactly what Nathan's proposing. There was a study that one of these researchers did where they asked, they did a survey of pilots, and they asked them, like, how do you feel about... improving your communication skills.
And a lot of pilots were like, that sounds like girl stuff.
Yeah. although I'm not a very serious pilot myself, I haven't dedicated my life to it the way that a professional pilot has, but I do spend a fair bit of time amongst pilots. And I do think that there is a pilot culture. I think that pilots have a certain kind of character to them. And I think that there's a reason for that. You are doing a life or death thing.
You have to have your ducks in a row. You have to fundamentally take it seriously, or you're not going to be around very long. And so pilots have a certain kind of no-nonsense attitude. But there is something, I think, really smart about recognizing that humility, for instance.
I mean, I think humility is an important concept both for doctors in the surgical suite and for pilots and captains in the cockpit.
But I think there's a major caveat to that, which is that we do not live in normal times. There's an old saying, regulations are written in blood. One of the major drivers of regulatory change in aviation has been plane crashes, people dying. And so a lot of the rules that you see in that rule book are there because at least one person died.
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