This is Your Captain Speaking. Brace for Impact! Manuals Cutting Corners — not Cool!
Compromising on life-saving Print Documentation Usability design delays response time in emergencies.
US Airways Flight 1549 is recorded in history books as one of the most incredible aviation feats. To quickly refresh our minds and recall the event — US Airways Flight 1549 after taking off from LaGuardia, NY, hit a flock of birds followed by dual engine loss — zero thrust. The incident rendered the commercial and modern Airbus 320 into a Glider in a matter of few seconds. Captain Sully took control of the aircraft and ambidextrously guided it to a controlled water landing on the Hudson River. It was a happy ending; all 155 souls on board lived to tell the tale.
The QRH — Quick Reference Guide
The QRH is a print documentation available in all commercial aircraft created by Technical Communicators working with the aircraft manufacturers. It is a Guide that pilots refer to in an event of an emergency such as engine failure. It contains documented procedural steps to execute and come out of the emergency. After the dual-engine loss, Sully called out to Jeff Skiles, the First Officer, to retrieve the QRH and navigate to the page outlining steps to execute for engine loss scenario.
Sullenberger(3:27:28): “Get the QRH….Loss of Thrust of both engines.”
First Officer Jeff Skiles retrieved the QRH and scrambled to navigate to the page dealing with engine loss scenario. The QRH in US Airways Flight 1549 was a printed guidebook something like the one pictured below:
However, Sully remarked in his book SULLY that in previous editions of QRHs, it came with protruding physical tabs with labels or numbers. For example, labels such as “Emergency” or numbered tabs such as “Procedure number 27” something like pictured below:
This design enabled the user to quickly locate the scenario and navigate to the page in emergencies where time is of the essence. Sadly though, Sully said that US Airways, in a cost-cutting measure, got rid of the protruding numbered tabs and instead printed the number of each procedure on the page itself. Due to this unfriendly design change in the QRH, Jeff Skiles scrambled to locate and navigate to the correct page quickly as he had to open the pages and thumb through them — increasing the response time.
According to Sully’s testimony to the NTSB — National Transportation Safety Board, he said it took Jeff extra seconds to locate and navigate to the page with the relevant procedure.
Aviation industry had been in a slump at that time and hence they resorted to cost-cutting measured. However, they overlooked how critical and crucial it is to have access to a user-friendly, well-designed QRH for the Pilots. They gave little or perhaps no priority to the usability testing of the print documentation. The US Airways incident was a time-suppressed one and every second was crucial for survival. Having a commercial jetliner out of engines, gliding in the sky is not a very savory situation to behold or experience. Quick response time matters in such cases and if anything hinders that, it could prove catastrophic.
The bottom line is that in any highly regulated industry like Aviation, there should be no compromise on providing easily-accessible print documentation containing life-saving information to the users. Not only in the Aviation industry but across all functional, high-impact industries, where safety is integral, high priority must be given to documentation that is well-designed, intuitive and user-friendly. Saving lives should be considered more important than Cutting Corners from the docs. Period.
