Amanda Ripley Author of The Unthinkable

Yesterday, federal investigators interviewed the pilots of the Northwest plane that overshot its Minneapolis-St. Paul destination by 110 miles last week. So far, some people have been skeptical of the pilots’ vague explanation to date: that they got distracted during a heated discussion about airline policy and lost track of time.

But I don’t find that explanation hard to buy, personally. This problem is well-known to pilots. So well-known that they have a name for it—“task saturation”—as well as specialized training to try to avoid it.

The brain works on one thing at a time. This much we know. And pilots have gotten into terrible trouble before because they were absorbed in one thing to the exclusion of all others.

Cockpit myopia was a huge issue in the 1970s, when airplane pilots started to realize that the more stressed they got, the less they saw. As stress increased, they tended to become mentally obsessed with one data point to the exclusion of all others.

Consider the story of the green light. On the evening of December 29, 1972, an Eastern Air Lines jet coming from New York City began its final approach to Miami International Airport. The flight had been uneventful, and the weather in Miami was clear. The plane carried 163 passengers, most of them holiday travelers.

But when the pilots tried to lower the landing gear, they didn’t get a green light indicating that the gear was fully down.At 11:34 P.M, the captain, who had more than three decades of experience, called the Miami control tower to explain that he would have to circle while they worked on getting the green light. The plane climbed to two thousand feet and began a wide U-turn over the airport. For the next eight minutes, the flight crew tried to figure out what was wrong. Why wouldn’t the light go on? The captain ordered two different people to try to visually confirm that the gear was down, but they couldn’t see anything in the dark.

At 11:40, a half-second alarm tone went off in the cockpit, indicating that the plane had deviated from its altitude. The transcript from the cockpit voice recorder shows that no one said anything about the alarm. It was as if they hadn’t heard it at all. The crew continued to speculate about possible reasons for the light problem. But then, two minutes later, the first officer noticed another problem.

“We did something to the altitude,” he said. “What?” the captain said.

The first officer backtracked: “We’re still at 2,000, right?”

Then the captain said, “Hey, what’s happening here?”

Another warning sound began to beep, more insistently this time. Two seconds later, the plane crashed into the Everglades, 19 miles from the airport.

Investigators would find that the plane had been in fine working order—except for the lightbulbs in the landing-gear indicator, which had burned out. While the flight crew worried about the light, the plane had dipped toward the earth. When it sliced into the soggy marshland,it disintegrated on impact. The wreckage was scattered over an area 1,600 feet long and 330 feet wide. A total of 101 people died.

The crash, and several other unnervingly similar accidents, convinced aviation researchers that pilots needed to be trained to avoid task saturation.“This happens to everybody under stress,” Rogers V. Shaw II, who trains pilots for the FAA, told me when I was working on my book. “If there’s not enough training, you get channelized on one thing, and you forget the whole big picture.”

Today, Shaw trains pilots to proactively scan their instrument panels, over and over again, to counteract the tendency to fixate on one problem. He also teaches pilots to make sure one member of the flight crew remains focused on flying the plane at all times.

It’s too soon to say if task saturation was the cause of the Northwest incident. But the prospect that it might be reminds me of the power of the green-light story—a lesson not just for pilots but for anyone who drives anything. Your brain wants to work on one thing at a time. And no, you are not different, and no, that email you feel you absolutely must read while on the highway is not actually very important.

So far, the biggest problem with the swine flu vaccine seems to be that it is hard to find. This may not be a bad thing, at least not from a public-health perspective. If the vaccine were easy to find, fewer people would want it. It’s perverse but true. Long lines can be good for your health.

When humans are faced with a shortage of a commodity, they tend to want more. In a bar, the research shows, men and women tend to view each other as increasingly attractive the closer it gets to closing time. Same thing goes for vaccines. From a 2008 paper, “Short on Shots,” out of the Univ. of California, Berkeley:

“[P]erceptions of scarcity can induce a sharp increase in demand due to rising salience of the scarce good, worsening whatever true shortage there might be. Some of the great famines in history like those in Bengal in 1943, Ethiopia in 1973, and Bangladesh in 1974 in fact occurred without any disruption in supply (Sen, 1981). The “Great Toilet Paper Shortage’’ caused in zest by Johnny Carson in 1973 also occurred without any change in supply.”

The rest of this study is even more interesting. The researchers took advantage of the 2004 flu-vaccine shortage to see how changes in supply—and rhetoric—can influence demand.

Here’s how they did it: At one university campus, the researchers sent one group of departments an email warning of shortages in the vaccine supply and setting out a schedule for vaccinations. Then the researchers sent another email to another group with the same information plus a request (much like the one made nationally by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at the time) that people outside the high-risk groups hold off on getting vaccinated.

Well, a few interesting things happened. First, there was an overall increase in demand for the vaccine, now that there was a shortage. This was true all over the nation that year, by the way. Many people who had not been vaccinated before suddenly wanted the vaccine, now that it was hard to get.

But something even more suprising happened at this particular campus clinic. The request for non-high-risk people to show restraint seemed to backfire—leading to exactly the opposite result! Among the group that received that appeal for benevolence, more people came out to be vaccinated. Most perversely of all, the increase was due entirely to people in the non-priority groups. People in the high-risk groups? Well, they seemed to listen to the call for restraint and stay home…

A nice example of how very complex it can be to try to engineer human behavior during a pandemic.

So far, the best advice I have seen for how to improve the long lines came from one of the people waiting in such a line: “Letting some coffee vendors know about us here would…be a nice thing,” Dan Orbach told a Washington Post reporter, outside of a Montgomery County, MD, clinic yesterday.

In case you missed it, the Secretary of Homeland Security was on Jon Stewart the other night. Most memorable part: Janet Napolitano’s laugh. The woman can laugh like nobody’s business. Like Santa on a bender.

She did plug the swine flu vaccine, and she said that the most frustrating thing about her job was managing 23 formerly separate outfits, located in 23 different places. Under pressure, she declined to reveal her security “code name.” But mostly, she laughed and laughed. I suppose it’s good to have a sense of humor in that job.

In Indonesia, emergency workers are having a very hard time getting into several remote villages devastated by last Wednesday’s 7.6-magnitude earthquake. As we’ve seen in every major disaster in history, regular people matter more than anyone else in the darkness of these voids. During the golden hours when rescue is possible, civilians do much of the lifesaving—and they are capable of remarkable creativity. It is wrenching and inspiring at once.

A few examples out of Indonesia:

“Every day on the road to Pariaman, a hard-hit district in the north, four or five women gather to make heaping plates of food for a village of 200, while their husbands collect donations from cars driving by.”—Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 5, 2009

“On one block in the city’s Chinese quarter, workers at a coal concern and a truck rental company set up a base from which they dispatched much-needed earth-moving vehicles across the city.”—New York Times, Oct. 4, 2009

“In a district north of the hard-hit city of Padang, stricken residents said they’d seen no rescue workers. Most structures there had been leveled, and people were using shovels and their bare hands to clear landslides and dig out bodies.”—CBS News, Oct. 2, 2009

I highlight these stories not just because they are poignant but because they are evidence for what we need to do differently. In every country, we can do more to appreciate regular people—and invest in their training and knowledge—before we need them most.

Check out a story from Mercy Corps about how small investments in regular people helped a village survive last week.

Michael Specter has a piece in the New Yorker about how dangerous, anti-vaccine rumors may be threatening the campaign to vaccinate Americans against H1N1. It’s interesting, especially the bit about Bill Maher’s bizarre Tweet, but the piece feels premature to me…

At the moment, the bigger problem with the vaccine is that nobody knows when or where they can get it. The first doses just came out this week, and the feds are leaving it up to the states and locals to distribute them. Just like in most emergencies, your experience will depend almost entirely on how competent (and well-funded) your local officials are. Or, as Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius recently explained:

“We’ll never, from the mother ship, give one national picture. It’s going to be many, many local decisions.”

Welcome to the theme for this fall. Local, local, local. While it may make sense for the federal government to provide clear and specific direction, it ain’t gonna happen. Federalism makes hard things harder…

For now, confusion—and demand—seem to be swamping conspiracy and condemnation. As the New York Times reports today, pediatricians’ offices are currently being overwhelmed with calls from concerned parents who just want to know when, where and whether to vaccinate their kids. The problem is, nobody at the doctors’ offices knows the answers yet… And anyone who has been to a pediatrician’s office knows that it is the last place to expect agile customer service. So what we have now is a lot of irritated receptionists and frustrated parents.

There is a powerful anti-vaccine movement that may jeopardize this unprecedented public-health quest, but I don’t see it happening just yet. However, there’s still lots of time!

For now, parents who are baffled can find out (some) info from the CDC’s new brochure (warning: pdf) for parents—preciously subtitled in crayon font.

While I’m at it, here’s an updated advisory for pregnant women, also from the CDC.

I did a swine flu interview the other day on Public Radio International’s To the Point. Most valuable moment: Dr. Georges Benjamin of the American Public Health Association does a really nice job of explaining how the flu virus works—and why it can change so dramatically (or, as he puts it, “makes a mistake”) as it reproduces. (He starts talking around minute 24, for those of you in the mood for a short biology lesson.)

Why this new virus (and all the media coverage about it) is so maddening. My new story in TIME explains why pandemic H1N1 (and the upcoming vaccine) are so hard for the brain to understand. A threat that hovers in the blind spots of our risk calculus.

Also, not to be missed! Test your Swine Flu IQ—an online quiz. See, who says pandemics can’t be fun?

Despite the combined forces of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and frightened farmers everywhere, legal scholar Cass Sunstein has been confirmed as Obama’s regulatory czar.

A small victory for facts over fear. Also known, in contemporary politics, as a miracle.

The Senate approved Sunstein by a vote of 57 to 40.