Normalization of Deviance

A Threat to Aviation Safety

By: Karlene Petitt

Narrated by: Pamela Almand

The things that airlines, aircraft manufacturers, and the FAA are not sharing with the public. This audiobook is the result of the author’s doctoral research—Safety Culture, Training, Understanding, Aviation Passion: The Impact on Manual Flight and Operational Performance. While the intent of the research was to learn what predicted manual flight, what was learned may have predicted and, if heeded, prevented the Lion Air Flight 602, 2018 crash, Ethiopian Flight 302, 2019 crash, and Atlas Air Flight 3591, 2019 crash. What was learned could also have prevented the Air France Flight 447 crash. We now have the data that proves we can’t simply blame the pilot.

There is never one reason an accident occurs, but a chain of events. If you travel, fly, or touch aviation in any aspect, you have every reason to listen to this audiobook.

©2019 Karlene Petitt (P)2025 Karlene Petitt

Proficiency/training gap growing!

You can’t really expect pilots to be proficient when flying because so much airline flying time is mandated by company policy to be automated for efficiency purposes, etc.

Sim time is not readily available.

Multiple-choice tests don’t REALLY tests pilots’ mental model of the underlying systems.

When systems fail, we don’t want pilots doing multiple guess—we want them to know relatively soon the correct answer.

Failure to fix this training gap will contribute to more catastrophes.