Some aircraft accidents and many aircraft incidents (e.g., “near misses”) can be determined to have resulted from miscommunications, either between the aircraft’s crew and air-traffic control or within the aircraft crew itself. The features of language that create the relevant problematic misunderstandings are exactly those that make language itself useful for everyday communication in the first place. These include ambiguity, homophony, reference, implicit inference, intonation, code-switching, and routinization. The kinds of problems in question would not arise, if we were to use, for example, basic algebra or predicate calculus, which lack these essential but potentially problematic features, as our everyday means of linguistic interaction, nor would very much useful communication occur. This paradoxical fact raises the hypothesis that dynamical systems thinking might offer some guidance in teasing out the factors that lead to catastrophic communicative trajectories and thereby help us to understand and, perhaps, prevent these problems. This paper reviews the range of problems that arise and invites discussion of this hypothesis.

1908 first plane crash (fatality also); photo by CH Claudy, taken from Wikipedia