What if, de Crespigny thought to himself, I imagine this plane as a Cessna? What would I do then? “That moment is really the turning point,” Barbara Burian, a research psychologist at NASA who has studied Qantas Flight 32, told me. “When de Crespigny decided to take control of the mental model he was applying to the situation, rather than react to the computer, it shifted his mindset. Now, he’s deciding where to direct his focus instead of relying on instructions.
