Wednesday 27 March 2019

An extreme example of the decline of intelligence and ability

It is more than  twenty years since British organisations stopped trying to appoint and promote the best people - rather than favouring those of particular sex/ual orientation, race, class etc. And there has also been, and is continuing, a rapid (genetically mediated) decline in average intelligence and conscientious personality.

So - I am unsurprised when I see more and more evidence of incompetence. But this one is very extreme indeed!

It should not be possible, but it happened.

A British Airways airline flight was supposed to go from London to Dusseldorf, Germany - but instead it landed in Edinburgh, Scotland - a difference of some 700 miles separated by the North Sea - and the pilot apparently did not notice until after landing in Edinburgh.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-6847697/BA-passengers-board-plane-fly-Dusseldorf-pilot-takes-EDINBURGH.html

Just think about that - for a moment. Yet the airline seemed quite relaxed about the error.

Get used to it - more and worse is on its way. Once you stop even trying to do your best, there is no limit to how bad things can become.

7 comments:

Seijio Arakawa said...

As far as I understood it (as far as it is possible to understand from the information given) the mix-up would have to be at the airport terminal. That is, the pilots at gate such-and-such would have to be told (via authoritative-looking computer instructions) to fly to Edinburgh from the get-go, but the staff and passengers at the airport terminal would have to be told (via authoritative-looking computer instructions, delivered via the glossy hypnotic glowing screens) to board the plane at gate such-and-such with passengers bound for Dusseldorf. The discrepancy would only be obvious in a faulty computer system somewhere, and the bureaucratic IQ decline would likewise be with the people who wrote that system and removed on-the-ground accountability from boarding procedures.

At the airport itself, IQ was largely irrelevant because, as in so many other fields, things have been reduced in the Ahrimanic spirit to 'just following orders' that come out from somewhere unknown... anyone applying his intelligence on-the-spot in such a setting would be considered 'disruptive'.

Of course, there would still be opportunities to spot the error -- sometimes, people flash the boarding pass at the flight attendants on the way in, either mechanically, or to get assistance with finding a seat. The flight attendants ought to presumably know where they are going....

Perhaps someone or a few people had a suspicion, but the psychological weight of having to Make a Decision that brings the whole well-oiled Ahrimanic machine screeching to a halt was too much?

To my mind, there was an even worse recent incident where a plane making an emergency landing in Labrador had to spend the night on the tarmac with its door stuck open because Canadian Customs and Immigration in that village couldn't be arsed to operate outside regular working hours and no one else dared to do anything. Eventually someone had the idea to buy food from Tim Hortons (the one reliable and ubiquitous form of Canadian infrastructure) and put it in the door. Contrasting with the prior fame of the Newfoundlanders' response to 9/11, with numerous planes landing in Gander, passengers swiftly processed and given room and board with ordinary local residents while everything was sorted out, and so forth, makes that incident particularly shameful and consistent with demoralization and bureaucratic decline being startlingly swift.

Bruce Charlton said...

@Seijio - I had seen a different explanation (in The Independent) - but the point is that everyone involved was on Autopilot, all the time. Which is my point.

Epimetheus said...

It's bad. When I was in flight school, a female minority cadet flew into a major city's control zone without clearance and nearly collided with another aircraft, which would have killed everyone involved. The government intervened to prevent her expulsion from the program - she had previously featured in magazines as the program's diversity mascot.

She graduated in good standing with the rest of us.

Bruce Charlton said...

General comment wrt blaming Ahrimanic procedure - there is a synergistic interaction between reducing intelligence and the imposition of procedural ways of doing things. I have noticed that many managers lack the intelligence to recognise that there is any other way of doing things - let alone any better way - than breaking the task into simple steps that they themselves can understand. Even when skill and expertise does things right in front of their eyes that cannot be done by procedures*, they react with a kind of fear and hostility - and go ahead to destroy the skill anyway. In this, they reveal their implicit service to Ahriman - since the plan is to eliminate everything from life that cannot be done in this mindless fashion.

*An example is airport security - or so I have read. The Israeli system involves small numbers of highly skilled experts roaming around unpredictably doing whatever is needed to detect and stop terrorism and it is 100 percent effective so far; by contrast, the mainstream Western system involves armies of minimum wage affirmative action drones following standard procedures orientated towards avoiding profiling and sterotypes (e.g. 'randomly' stopping and searching young native born children travelling with their families, in my experience) - and of course these systems fail again and again!

Dexter said...

Terrifying that the pilot did not notice he had the wrong flight plan!

If it had directed him to fly to New York, would he have mindlessly done that, causing the jet to run out of gas and plunge into the ocean? ("Oops, sorry everyone!")

Seijio Arakawa said...

Attempting to dig further into what actually happened ended up hurting my brain. The key discrepancy to me is the behaviour of the passengers who allegedly only realized their destination when the landing announcement was made -- wouldn't they be able to tell what's happening earlier and, if so, were they in so much of a docile and uncurious state?

Dexter said...

More airborne stupidity:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/travel_news/article-6912323/Scandinavian-Airlines-plane-fly-Florence-lands-65-miles-away-Bologna.html

A Scandinavian Airlines plane that was due to fly to Florence ended up landing 65 miles away in Bologna after an error with the GPS system.
...
However, it was decided that the plane would take off anyway and head to Bologna, with the passengers then taken by bus to their final destination.

[They weren't even smart enough to fix the problem!]