FaceApp and the breaking of the OODA loop

One would think that the Cambridge Analytica scandal would be fresh in the minds of the public, since it was only four months ago (March 2019) that it broke. In case four months ago is ancient history to you, the scandal was that an innocent-looking app, "This is Your Digital Life", collected data about users that were used for nefarious purposes.

However, the popularity of FaceApp, a Facebook application that does an admirable job projecting what you will look like when you are old (or younger, or a different gender, etc.), makes it obvious that millions and millions of people learned nothing at all from the revelations of a mere four months ago.

Top Gun meets FaceApp. Credit: no idea

To what should be the surprise of no one who paid attention to Cambridge Analytica, FaceApp isn't just changing your picture: it's collecting it for whatever use they decide to put it to.

One of the more popular psychological models in aviation is the OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. In short, you see something, figure out one or more ways to react, decide which one to do, then do it.

The important part is that the OODA loop is a loop. That means that once you've acted, you observe what impact your actions had and start the loop again. The Wikipedia entry for praxis breaks down these post-act steps even further:

• Taking the action
• Considering the impacts of the action
• Analyzing the results of the action by reflecting upon it
• Altering and revising conceptions and planning following reflection
• Implementing these plans in further actions

That's a long-winded way of saying, "After you do something, see if what you did worked. Learn from it either way." If you don't do both, you break the loop. Your powerful "OODA loop" flops uselessly into a limp, wet "OODA noodle". An ooda nooda.

An example of what the OODA Noodle gives you comes from an experience I had this spring. So there I was, flying an approach. The winds are howling out of the west, stirred up and irritated by their passage across the Blue Ridge mountains, and are almost a direct crosswind, 25 knots gusting to 40. Suddenly, at about 300 feet above the ground, I experience a 30-knot gain of airspeed: in other words, some pretty bad wind shear.

Hope is a bad plan in an airplane, so I'm not going to sit there and hope this turns out okay anyway. I push the thrust levers forward and begin the standard go-around procedure. ATC gives us an altitude to climb to and a heading to turn to, and I'm steering the plane that direction, hand-flying it all the way.

As my First Officer changes the navigation source, we get a caution chime and the yellow blinking light on the panel illuminates. Since I'm not expecting a caution at that point in the flight, I look to the screen and see a "LATERAL MODE OFF" caution message. No big deal; with this plane, if you enter the navigation mode and then change the navigation source, it turns off the mode.

This makes sense, because it doesn't know what mode you want with the new source. That message is the flight guidance computer's way of saying, "You told me to do something, but you didn't tell me what that something is." In that case, it will put the flight director in roll mode. It doesn't know what to do, so it reverts to leveling the wings until you make up your mind. That's a logical choice by the engineers who designed the system: if you don't know what to do, don't do anything stupid.

My First Officer cancels the caution and continues doing stuff. I naturally figure that one of the things he's going to do is to fix the navigation mode, but he completely ignores the message. When it becomes obvious that he skipped the end part of the OODA loop (in other words, he never took the time to see what impact his cancelling of the caution had), I ask him to put me in heading mode so my flight director will match where I'm actually pointing the plane.

In the meantime, since we were the second plane in a row to have to go around because of wind shear, ATC switches runways and starts using the one pointing into the wind. We land uneventfully the second time around and the flight becomes just another line in the logbook.

I have my own "enhanced" OODA loop, which means that the flight isn't over once it's in the logbook. I spin one last time through the loop as I think about the flight afterward, using the praxis steps above in a post-flight analysis and reflection. I think about how what I did turned out, how it might have turned out had I done something else, and come up with things to learn from and/or do better in the future.

As I said in my previous post, "flying is a constant three-dimensional puzzle that you have to continuously be solving." Once you're done with solving that particular flight, you can use that solution as a basis for solving future flights. In some ways, OODA and the WOPR from the classic movie Wargames have something in common:

When pilots don't do this, they repeat mistakes over and over again. When people don't do this, they fall for two scams in less than a year. That makes as much sense as being beaten with a wet noodle.



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The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with ERJ-145 and DHC-8 type ratings, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program and a former FAASafety Team representative. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

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