In safety studies, normalized deviance is the pattern by which a system creeps from labeling specific behaviors “dangerous” to labeling them “abnormal but not yet a proven danger” to labeling them “well, I know, but we’ve been doing it this way all along” to labeling them “normal.”
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It is insane — absolutely insane — to have an official helicopter flight path cross over a final descent path of one of the busiest airports in the country. It is insane to do this while having the helicopters and landing planes use radio systems that don’t let them talk to each other. It is insane to have the helicopters often be military craft on training missions, running with barely any lights, in the middle of a sprawling urban lightscape, at night. It is insane to have those pilots often use night-vision goggles that block out their peripheral vision when the planes they have to watch for are arriving from the side. It is insane to have the air traffic control tower managing this setup be understaffed, at just 63 percent of its FAA-recommended level as of September 2023. It is insane for all this to happen below 1,000 feet, where the standard collision avoidance system for commercial aircraft by design shuts off.
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When an organization gets stuck in the rut of normalized deviance, extraordinary things must happen to shock it back out. It can be bold, charismatic new leadership. More often it is a dramatic, public catastrophe.
