Party Time: Lessons from the aviation investigative process on “fact checking”

In the wake of the airline accidents in Washington DC, Pennsylvania, and Toronto, social and traditional media has been flooded with pictures, (questionable) expert commentary, and theories as to the causes. Before any investigation has even begun, before any evidence has been gathered, before the witnesses can be interviewed or black boxes recovered, an army of “aviation correspondents” eager for their 15 minutes of fame flock to network news and podcasts to deliver their two-cent opinions to anyone who will click on the link. And frankly, with inflation these days, their opinion is still only worth two cents.

Our job as safety professionals is to determine the cause of the accident, deliver that information to the public, and provide recommendations to prevent tragedy in the future. As professionals, we owe it to the victims to get it right. In aviation, the body responsible for accident and incident investigation is the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). An independent agency, the NTSB has no prosecutorial or law enforcement teeth to mete out punishment; their sole mission is to determine the cause of transportation accidents and formulate recommendations for safety. But to do so, they must have access to accurate information and have the ability to assess the information they do have, even if it is outside their technical expertise.

A parallel can be drawn with the general public. Since the age of social media there is the ability for the public to access information at a nearly unprecedented scale. But the quality of that information varies widely, from the accurate and truthful, to the absolutely goofy (and before anyone asks, yes, the Earth is round. We figured it out like 3000 years ago with a couple of sticks in the desert. Please stop coming to the flight deck to ask. I don’t care what you saw on the tickety-toks). I’m familiar with Amy Willis’s “Searching for Truth in a Social Media World” discussing a conversation between Russ Roberts and Arnold Kling on feedback loops with regard for information Econtalk, and while I haven’t formulated a good answer to her question of why bad information simply doesn’t go out of business, I would like to share my perspective on information gathering.

How do safety professionals vet their information to make sure it is accurate and unbiased? The answer is simple, if a bit counter-intuitive: by inviting everyone vested interest to the table. The investigative process of the NTSB relies on what they call the Party System. In a high-stakes investigation such an accident with fatalities, there are plenty of interested parties with an interest in the outcome: the aircraft manufacturer would be eager to show their systems were safe and reliable, the airline would want to demonstrate their business practices were not at fault, etc. The NTSB determines what parties are interested and have expertise they require (within limits: those with legal or litigative positions are not allowed to be assigned to the investigative process, but for the sake of this metaphor, we’ll pretend they don’t exist). Those who have the technical expertise or insight are invited to actively participate in the investigation. Eventually, each party is asked to prepare a factual report and they are all asked to verify the accuracy of the others. The parties do not participate in the actual analysis and report writing writing phase, but their own reports and findings are included in the public docket. The NTSB then deliberates over the final result and reports their findings. At its very core, this Party system uses each organization’s self-interest as a check on the others’ self-interest.

Let’s expand this metaphor to something we’re all more familiar with: ourselves. Constantly, we are assaulted by a deluge of information. Most of it is about as useful as glow-in-the-dark sunglasses. But just because information is bad, inaccurate, or biased, does that mean it should be excluded from the public? That decision should come down to the individual. Like the NTSB, we have a moral responsibility to ourselves and our community to seek out the best possible information. We should hear as many different (relevant) perspectives as possible, rattle them around in our head for a bit, then determine a course of action. We have the capacity to do so. It’s a disservice to public discourse if we start excluding ideas because they don’t pass a fact check or they’re too “woke”. Invite everyone to lay their cards on the table, and use self interest as a motivator rather than an axe.