Teamwork in Apache helicopters

Apache attack helicopters are operated by a crew of two pilots (a dual-crew concept) in a tandem configuration, a backseater (BS) and a frontseater (FS).⁹ A tandem configuration means that one pilot sits behind the other, as opposed to next to each other, such as in airliners. Operating in a dual-crew concept creates the opportunity for providing each other with a fresh perspective on the situation at hand when things tend to turn for the worse. Apache crews therefore are exemplary candidates for the study of issues on social performance.

Apache crews are socially entangled with each other – both inside and out-side the helicopter. Typically, Apache crew-pairings consist of members from the same military aviation unit. They might even be members of the same flight group within that unit. Also, chances are high that Apache pilots within an aviation unit have been through similar initial training. In the helicopter, obvi-ously, they are held physically tightly together by the shape and size of the helicopter fuselage. All this enables them to establish a substantial amount of overlap in cognitive functioning – and thus to function as a team. After all, as Jenkins, Stanton, Salmon, Walker and Young (2008) summarise a 2006 study of Stanton et al. on distributed situation awareness: ‘to fully exploit the benefits

9 For the remainder of this article the acronyms FS and BS are used. Dependent on the context, FS for instance can refer to the actual front seat, but could also refer to the front seat operator, the so-called FS.

of distributed [cognitive] activities within complex systems, there is a need for compatibility in situation awareness’.

Such similarities in backgrounds and working conditions could however make it difficult to actually provide a fresh perspective on things. From a sys-tems point of view therefore – that takes the position that more of an operator’s performance is shaped by its contextual surroundings (Dekker: 2006, 91) – one could ask how these pilots could be able to create something analogous to a

‘stereo binocular vision’ on things? (which is the kind of cognitive benefit that – many believe – results from social redundancy). It is concerns like these that led to the study described in this article.

3.2. Theoretical framework

In the past decennia, high reliability theorists (HRTs) ‘have studied a variety of high risk organisations and have reached quite optimistic conclusions about the prospects for safely managing hazardous technologies in modern society’ (Sagan 1993, 14). They believe that functional duplication or overlap – ‘redundancy’ – can contribute greatly to a larger system’s reliability (e.g. Rochlin, La Porte and Roberts: 1987; La Porte and Consolini: 1991, 23). In the case of functional duplication, this means that ‘two different units perform the same function’, whereas in the case of functional overlap it is understood as ‘two units have some functional areas in common’ (Rochlin et al.: 1987, 84). If one system fails, the other – redundant – system takes over, partly or fully, and – theoretically – the more automatically the better.

The concept of redundancy originates in the technical realm, as a design fea-ture to be embedded in mechanical systems. Over time, however, redundancy has been introduced in the social realm as well. Based on the definition for

‘operational redundancy’ proposed by Rochlin et al. (1987, 84)¹⁰ a definition for social redundancy could be ‘the presence of people with the ability to take over (cognitive) task execution from others when deemed necessary, either partly or fully.’ Substituting one actor for another may however not help much for safety when the one who is stepping in operates under similar presumptions and beliefs about the situation at hand as the one who is replaced. Also, contrary to

10 ‘Operational redundancy’, according to Rochlin et al. (1987, 84), is ‘the ability to provide for the execution of a task if the primary unit fails or falters.’

mechanical performance, ‘correct’ human functioning cannot be captured in algorithms. Only hindsight can tell (sometimes) whether an intervention on human performance by another human was for the best. A distinction thus has to be made between the ‘dry’ concept of social redundancy and effective social redundancy, where effective social redundancy can be defined as ‘to utilise the area of (cognitive) duplication or overlap amongst social actors in such a manner that social accomplishment is established in a safe and effective manner.’ HRT scholars, unfortunately, do not provide much guidance on how to establish this.

Proponents of resilience engineering, on the other hand, have begun to address this issue. They suggest that ‘bringing in a fresh perspective’ might be an effective – although not ultimate – strategy to achieve social accomplishment (e.g. De Keyser and Woods: 1990; Patterson, Cook, Woods and Render: 2004;

Patterson, Roth, Woods, Chow and Gomes: 2004). Fresh perspectives after all, so they argue, can ‘generate more hypotheses, cover more contingencies, openly debate rationales for decision making, and reveal hidden assumptions’ in collaborative systems (Dekker and Lundström: 2007, 8).

One issue is that bringing in a fresh perspective specifically, and social re-dundancy in general, may not have the kind of impact resilience engineering theorists believe it should have. Social systems, after all, are complex systems since they contain ‘unfamiliar or unintended feedback loops’ (Perrow:

1984/1999, 82). It is this complexity that sheds another light on the issue at hand here. Sagan (1993) elaborated on this in The limits of safety. He argued that the application of redundancy in complex worlds has downsides. Redundancy in complex systems, according to Sagan (1993, 39), can ‘lead to unanticipated common-mode failures’,¹¹ because ‘redundant systems [in complex systems]

often [are] less independent [from one another or from other system compo-nents] than their designers believe [they are]’. In the case of social systems for instance, individuals ‘must be able to predict the responses of others to some extent for coordinated action to be possible’ (Gersick and Hackman: 1990, 68).

Since redundancy can build in more capacity, a second downside of redundancy in complex systems that Sagan mentions is that this capacity is intended to benefit production goals, rather than be a resource for emergency situations (Sagan: 1993, 40). In social contexts this may especially be the case. After all,

11 ‘Common-mode failures’ refer to a simultaneous, concurrent or related failure of several critical components due to the ‘sometimes deliberate, but usually inadvertent condition where critical components share a common feature’ (Sagan: 1993, 33).

maintaining fully redundant personnel with no other tasks can be costly. A third consequence of building in redundancy in complex systems, according to Sagan (1993, 39), is that redundancy can increase the opaqueness of already complex systems: ‘individual component [...] failures will often be less visible, since they have been compensated for [– or hidden –] by overlap or backup devices’.

Taking all this into account, insights in complex social systems may not emerge due to subsystem dependency. Even if they do emerge, they may not be utilised, because within opaque systems it can be difficult to communicate these insights to other members of the community in an effective manner. In complex systems therefore, the impact of the application of social redundancy can be suboptimal – an issue that scholars of both HRT and resilience engineering have for the most part ignored.