On Mon, 28 Aug 2006 19:30:51 GMT, john smith wrote:

In article ,
Mxsmanic wrote:

I think seeing a heading of 260 instead of 220 while sitting on the
runway would clue me in, no matter what the signs looked like.

Not necessarily. Think of all the "read back, hear back" mishaps.
One hears what one expects to hear.
The same can be said for vision. One expects to see certain visual cues
so disregards the discrepancies.

Exactly.

A friend asked me about the Comair accident yesterday morning. I told
him that I was mystified why two experienced pilots didn't read their
heading info as they lined up with the runway.

I explained to him that, in my flying days years ago, I'd preset my DG
to the magnetic compass during preflight. Since it was hard to read
those little compasses with any precision, I'd wait until I was lined
up for takeoff to set the DG to the runway heading. Aligning the DG
automatically confirmed that I was using the intended runway.

It wasn't until later that morning that something, possibly relevant,
occurred to me.

In my case, I'd do something explicit - aligning my DG - that would
hammer the heading into my mind. I'd not only look at the heading,
I'd have to think about it.

In the case of the Comair pilots, they probably had a glass cockpit.
And, of course, they had no requirement for a heading adjustment, nor
any way to perform said adjustment even if they wanted to. Further,
they probably made 1000 takeoffs a year, 4 or 5 a day, day in, day
out. Sure, they'd look at their heading readouts every time, as I'm
sure they did on Sunday. But the heading had been right all those
years, every time they looked. They had every expectation that it
would be right, every time they looked, far into the future. Looking
at the heading had become a habit for them. But, perhaps, they'd
grown out of the habit of thinking about the heading they were seeing.

I don't know how transport pilots operate. If there's nothing
explicit in their takeoff procedures that have them call out or
crosscheck the heading before they apply takeoff power, I could see
how they could look at their heading, but not *see* it, and how this
accident might take place.

This might be a 'human factors' situation.

Can any transport pilots expound on your takeoff procedures? Is it
SOP to do something explict when you're checking your takeoff heading?

Thanks.

Tom