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LIT-1066: How a Cockpit Remembers Its Speeds

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StatusActive — read in full 2026-10-15 from the author's posted copy, a scan of the published article (Cognitive Science 19(3), pp. 265–288) at pages.ucsd.edu/~ehutchins/documents/CockpitSpeeds.pdf. Worth reading as the compact statement of distributed cognition's method, a cockpit treated as a cognitive system whose representations can be observed, and as the source of the speed-bug argument: setting the day's speeds as bugs on the airspeed indicator does not improve any pilot's memory but turns recall and scale-reading into a judgment of spatial proximity, so the memory "has now become a property of a larger system". For QUESTION-101 and CLAIM-296 it shows, by task analysis and not by measurement, a change of arrangement alone changing what the system can do; the retrieval cue (displayed gross weight, the needle nearing a bug) supplied by the environment; and the work of retrieval moved to a quiet phase 25 to 30 minutes ahead of use, which the record's deadline does not yet represent. It narrows them: its task is anticipated, mandated and invariant, it analyses only success, and it says nothing about search for one item among many under a deadline, which is CASE-085's situation.
Tagscognition, embodied-cognition, social-ontology
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-867 — Hutchins — How a cockpit remembers its speeds
Cited as “source” byTHEORY-351 — In a two-pilot airliner cockpit, setting the approach speeds as bugs on the airspeed indicators, prepared 25 to 30 minutes ahead in a low-workload phase from a card selected by the displayed gross weight, turns recall and scale reading at the moment of use into a judgement of spatial proximity, so the cockpit system remembers the speeds without either pilot's memory being improved; this is argued by task analysis of mandated procedure, not measured

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Hutchins, E. (1995). How a cockpit remembers its speeds. Cognitive Science 19(3), 265–288. DOI 10.1207/s15516709cog1903_1

Read in full (NOTE-867). A task analysis, not a measurement: the approach speeds are computed 25 to 30 minutes ahead, in a low-workload phase, from a speed card selected by the displayed gross weight, and set as bugs on the airspeed indicators. At the moment of use, recalling a number and reading a scale become a judgement of whether the needle is next to a bug. The cockpit remembers the speeds without either pilot’s memory being improved. The argument rests on mandated procedure for an anticipated, invariant task; nothing is measured.

Why this is here

The owner’s EMT case (CASE-085) is a team failing to deploy a resource in time though its presence was known. This paper is the classic study of a crew and its artifacts holding what no member holds alone, which is QUESTION-101’s subject and bears on CLAIM-296 and TERM-055. Closer to the case than Cognition in the Wild, which is Unavailable.

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