Airline employees, like professionals in most fields, don’t particularly trust regular people. “Like police, they think of civilians as a grade below them,” says Daniel Johnson, a research psychologist who has worked for the airlines in various capacities for more than three decades. At aviation conferences, he still has trouble getting experts to appreciate the human factor. “They would rather talk about hardware and training manuals—and not worry about what I consider equally important, which is the behavior of the actual people.”
