Seminary: Learning to Fly in "Alternate Law"

This morning I followed a link over at Tim Challies's blog and read a brief account of the last moments of Air France 447's ill-fated flight over the Atlantic on June 1, 2009. More than two years after the fatal flight, the flight data recorders have finally been recovered and analyzed, granting closure to family and friends that were heretofore ignorant of the details of the crash. The account offers not only the final words of the pilots, but also a running commentary in lay terms about what actually went wrong.

Without giving away the whole story (which is riveting), the plane crashed because of a complex of pilot errors including, but not limited to, a complete failure by the pilots to fly the plane successfully outside of "normal law." When in "normal law," a plane's computer restricts the ability of a pilot to enact procedures that might crash the plane. In emergency situations, however, a plane may revert to "alternate law," in which restrictions are removed to allow the pilot to use the full range of his training to control the plane. When the doomed plane went into "alternate law," however, the reader discovers that...

It's quite possible that [the co-pilot] had never flown an airplane in alternate law, or understood its lack of restrictions. According to [a U.S. Airways flight instructor], not one of US Airway's 17 Airbus 330s has ever been in alternate law. Therefore, [the co-pilot] may have assumed that the stall warning was spurious because he didn't realize that the plane could remove its own restrictions against stalling and, indeed, had done so.

What an arresting comment. The 32-year-old co-pilot had likely never flown outside of "normal law." He thought that the computer would not let him crash. He relied on the computer so absolutely that when it was removed, he was incapable of making basic observations and analysis, or of flying the airplane.

This kind of scenario happens all the time. Sometimes it is comical (a meteorologist announces sunny skies from his vantage in a windowless room, unaware of the rain falling outside); sometimes dangerous (a visiting trucker in the steep hills of Pennsylvania has no clue how to do an emergency gear down, maneuver on icy roads, or drive without cruise control).

It happens in seminary too. Sometimes students arrive with neither the ability to construct a footnote nor any intention of learning (we have Zotero after all). Others, similarly, have neither the ability to parse a verb nor any intention of learning (because we now have BibleWorks, Logos, and Accordance). Most have stunted ability to read a book and don't even know it (hasn't Control/Command F always been available to extract the key supporting sentence from that annoying forest of context?). Basic familiarity with and memorization of Scripture suffers (give me ten seconds and I can locate that key verse on my iPod thanks to OliveTree).

Much of the time, ministers can get away with this approach. Pastoral ministry usually operates, after all, in "normal law." But not always. And it is in those emergency situations that nothing can substitute for the intangible skill, forged by countless hours in the classroom and library, to operate in "alternate law." In a nutshell, that's why seminary exists.