You notice on the weather radar an area of heavy precipitation 25 miles ahead. [The pilot] is maintaining his present course at Mach .73, even though embedded thunderstorms have been reported in your area and you encounter moderate turbulence. You want to ensure that your aircraft will not penetrate this area.

Question: what do you say to the pilot?

In Fischer's and Orasanu's minds, there were at least six ways to try to persuade the pilot to change course and avoid the bad weather, each with a different level of mitigation.

Command: "Turn thirty degrees right." That's the most direct and explicit way of making a point imaginable. It's zero mitigation.

Crew Obligation Statement: "I think we need to deviate right about now." Notice the use of "we" and the fact that the request is now much less specific. That's a little softer.

Crew Suggestion: "Let's go around the weather." Implicit in that statement is "we're in this together."

Query: "Which direction would you like to deviate?" That's even softer than a crew suggestion, because the speaker is conceding that he's not in charge.

Preference: "I think it would be wise to turn left or right."

Hint: "That return at twenty-five miles looks mean." This is the most mitigated statement of all.

Fischer and Orasanu found that captains overwhelmingly said they would issue a command in that situation: "Turn thirty degrees right." They were talking to a subordinate. They had no fear of being blunt. The first officers, on the other hand, were talking to their boss, and so they overwhelmingly chose the most mitigated alternative. They hinted.

It's hard to read Fischer and Orasanu's study and not be just a little bit alarmed, because a hint is the hardest kind of request to decode and the easiest to refuse. In the 1982 Air Florida crash outside Washington, DC, the first officer tried three times to tell the captain that the plane had a dangerous amount of ice on its wings. But listen to how he says it. It's all hints:

FIRST OFFICER: Look how the ice is just hanging on his, ah, back, back there, see that?

Then:

FIRST OFFICER: See all those icicles on the back there and everything?

And then:

FIRST OFFICER: Boy, this is a, this is a losing battle here on trying to de-ice those things, it [gives] you a false feeling of security, that's all that does.

Finally, as they get clearance for takeoff, the first officer upgrades two notches to a crew suggestion:

FIRST OFFICER: Let's check those [wing] tops again, since we've been setting here awhile.

CAPTAIN: I think we get to go here in a minute.

The last thing the first officer says to the captain, just before the plane plunges into the Potomac River, is not a hint, a suggestion, or a command. It's a simple statement of fact-and this time the captain agrees with him.

FIRST OFFICER: Larry, we're going down, Larry.

CAPTAIN: I know it.

Mitigation explains one of the great anomalies of plane crashes. In commercial airlines, captains and first officers split the flying duties equally. But historically, crashes have been far more likely to happen when the captain is in the "flying seat." At first that seems to make no sense, since the captain is almost always the pilot with the most experience. But think about the Air Florida crash. If the first officer had been the captain, would he have hinted three times? No, he would have commanded-and the plane wouldn't have crashed. Planes are safer when the least experienced pilot is flying, because it means the second pilot isn't going to be afraid to speak up.

Combating mitigation has become one of the great crusades in commercial aviation in the past fifteen years. Every major airline now has what is called "Crew Resource Management" training, which is designed to teach junior crew members how to communicate clearly and assertively. For example, many airlines teach a standardized procedure for copilots to challenge the pilot if he or she thinks something has gone terribly awry. ("Captain, I'm concerned about..." Then, "Captain, I'm uncomfortable with..." And if the captain still doesn't respond, "Captain, I believe the situation is unsafe." And if that fails, the first officer is required to take over the airplane.) Aviation experts will tell you that it is the success of this war on mitigation as much as anything else that accounts for the extraordinary decline in airline accidents in recent years.

"On a very simple level, one of the things we insist upon at my airline is that the first officer and the captain call each other by their first names," Ratwatte said. "We think that helps. It's just harder to say, 'Captain, you're doing something wrong,' than to use a name." Ratwatte took mitigation very seriously. You couldn't be a student of the Avianca crash and not feel that way. He went on: "One thing I personally try to do is, I try to put myself a little down. I say to my copilots, 'I don't fly very often. Three or four times a month. You fly a lot more. If you see me doing something stupid, it's because I don't fly very often. So tell me. Help me out.' Hopefully, that helps them speak up."

8.

Back to the cockpit of Avianca 052. The plane is now turning away from Kennedy, after the aborted first attempt at landing. Klotz has just been on the radio with ATC, trying to figure out when they can try to land again. Caviedes turns to him.

CAVIEDES: What did he say?

KLOTZ: I already advise him that we are going to attempt again because we now we can't..."

Four seconds of silence pass.

CAVIEDES: Advise him we are in emergency.

Four more seconds of silence pass. The captain tries again.

CAVIEDES: Did you tell him?

KLOTZ: Yes, sir. I already advise him.

Klotz starts talking to ATC-going over routine details.

KLOTZ: One-five-zero maintaining two thousand Avianca zero-five-two heavy.