Andrew Gideon wrote
Yes, we're trusting the intructor. But there's still a difference, at
least as I see it, between (1) deliberately going past one's envelope with
the backup of an instructor, and (2) letting one get out of one's envelope
due to complacency. One is an intentional - and communicated, but I'm
thinking this is merely a consequence of intent - act while the other
occurs through a relaxation of one's attention/care/responsibility.

So what you're postulating is the existence of a pilot who stops
asessing risk just because the instructor is there, even though he's
actually a pilot who is already able to fly on his own, and thus
necessarily able to asess and manage risk? Are you sure this actually
happens? Because from my point of view, that's like abdicating one's
responsibility as a pilot, and dropping to the level of a passenger
who is allowed to manipulate the controls or share some cockpit tasks.

If that's what you mean, well, I admit there is a difference between
that and simply poor communication - but are you sure this actually
happens?

But this is a perfect example of "trust" and not "complacency". To turn
this into "complacency", the student would either (1) not notice because
he's paying less attention

But in training, it's fairly common and perfectly legitimate to force
the student to operate at task saturation for extended periods. This
will cause him not to notice things because he is paying less
attention - but this is the unavoidable price of teaching the
emergency survival skill of flying at task saturation.

(2) not tell the instructor. Either could
result from the student assuming that if there really were a problem, the
instructor would say something.

And that may be part of the ground rules of the flight.

For example, a hooded pilot abdicates the responsibility for collision
avoidance to the safety pilot. He can pretty much keep on trucking
unless the safety pilot says something.

This was a perfect example of poor communication.
Yes. Thanks for sharing it.

But do you see that there was no complacency involved? We both fully
understood that we were undertaking envelope expansion - that we would
be operating within his envelope but outside mine. Yet we still
screwed it up.

Perhaps. In this example, you accepted going past your envelope explicitly,
even though there was a communication failure. I still believe that
there's "more room for error": performing a task outside the envelope w/o
explicitly realizing/considering that fact.

I simply have a hard time imagining how it would happen. I mean, if
what you're doing is within your envelope, why do you have the
instructor there? You could simply do it yourself.

Michael