FMBR Editorial: Sep, 2017
Air Canada Near Miss and the Nature of Perception
Jerry Gin and Bill Gough
The near miss of the Air Canada flight at the San Francisco Airport leads us to question the nature of reality and how we create that reality through our perceptions. The National Transportation Safety Board said the pilots told investigators "that they did not recall seeing aircraft on taxiway but that something did not look right to them." In addition, Air Canada Flight 759 mistook a crowded taxiway for its approved runway, nearly triggering one of the worst aviation disasters ever. In the past, Edie Fischer had carried out experiments that simulated what happened with the Air Canada flight(NASA Technical Paper 1771).
As described by Matthias Gafni's article in the Mercury News (Did brain phenomenon contribute to Air Canada pilot's close-call at SFO, published July 28, 2017), Edie Fischer's research highlights the errors that can happen when mixed signals are received. "Fisher's experiment in 1980 for NASA had pilots land on a simulator. During one landing she secretly placed an airplane in the middle of the runway. During one phase of experiment 2 of 8 pilots didn't see the plane. The condition, known as confirmation bias, occurs when people accept or seek out evidence that confirms their expectations and ignore or avoid facts that don't align with their expectations..."
A theoretical basis for this phenomenon is presented in papers by Bill Gough and Bob Schacklett. We have proposed that the entire physical universe is an ever-changing configuration of waves (see Keys to an Expanded Scientific Paradigm [Section #6]) (Gough & Shacklett, 1993a:195-196). Even though we perceive our world as having solid form and substance, physics teaches that all the constituents of matter are in continuous vibration. The limitations of our perception are such that the vibratory nature of matter remains invisible to us. This is why we can refer to matter as "frozen light." For these reasons, the physical body can be considered a tunable probe in this infinite sea of vibrations. Our perception of reality at any given moment depends upon a combination of the input from the outer environment detected by our sense organs, our "inner light" originating from the non-physical realms, and the "state of the human probe" as determined by genetics, current physical condition, programming due to family, culture, etc.; and how one has self-tuned the human "transceiver" (see [Gough & Shacklett, 1995:27-28;30-32]).
We have postulated a feedback linkage between the physical world of form (patterns & symbols) and the non-physical phase. The non-physical phase represents the realm of archetypal blueprints that establishes the connectiveness and relationships with the larger whole. When we alter physical form, patterns or symbols, the feedback process results in changes in the nature of the physical events that we encounter. Consciously or unconsciously humans beings are always an element in this feedback process. Our mental/emotional processes (the patterns in our brain and body) provide a feedback linkage to the non-physical realms. It is this linkage that is at the basis of the statement that we are continually creating our own physical reality. As we learn to carefully observe external events, we will become more aware of the synchronicities that reinforce the self-tuning of our human transceiver.
A person who has carried out or viewed an act many times will have his mind fill in the expected result or picture. Pilots who have done a landing practice simulation or actual landings hundreds of times are more prone to see what they expect. It is very hard for them to see a change introduced into the image of the "reality" that they perceived. They will not believe that their mind is deceiving them. In Edie's experiment on the flight simulator the added plane was not seen by two of the eight pilots (25%). They believed the plane was there only after seeing the video tape of the landing. On the SFO near-miss a radio message from a United Airlines pilot on the ground probably caused the Air Canada pilot to begin his pull up before the controller gave the order to "go-around."
This phenomenon applies to many situations in life. This is a dangerous phenomenon in a political world involving nuclear weapons. It is why President Kennedy after the Cuban missile crisis chose to have the Russia/USA Hot Line use a slow teletype instead of faster communication options #151; it would force the parties to react more slowly.