Why are pilots so good at talking to each other?

Why are pilots so good at talking to each other?

Designing communication

When people think about aviation safety, they tend to picture technology. Modern aircraft, sophisticated avionics and highly trained pilots are all part of the story, but many of the industry’s biggest improvements weren’t technological at all. They were improvements to the way people communicate.

One of my favourite examples is the phrase, “I have control.” Whenever control of an aircraft changes hands, the pilot taking control announces, “I have control.” The other pilot then confirms, “You have control.” Only once both pilots have acknowledged the transfer is responsibility considered to have changed hands.

At first glance it feels almost unnecessarily formal, but that’s precisely why it works. If one pilot were simply to take the controls without saying anything, the other could quite reasonably assume they were still flying the aircraft. Two highly capable people, both acting in good faith, suddenly become a liability because one assumption was never made explicit.

The same philosophy appears throughout aviation. When Air Traffic Control gives an instruction, pilots don’t simply acknowledge it; they read it back. Communication isn’t considered complete simply because something has been said. It only becomes complete once both people know they’ve understood the same thing.

How many meetings have we all walked out of convinced everyone was aligned, only to discover a week later that four people left with four completely different interpretations of what had been agreed? That isn’t usually a failure of intelligence or effort. More often, it’s a failure of the communication itself.

Then there are checklists. They’re probably aviation’s best-known safety tool, yet they’re often misunderstood. A checklist isn’t there because a pilot has forgotten how to fly an aeroplane any more than a concert pianist has forgotten how to play the piano. It’s there because routine tasks shouldn’t rely on memory, particularly when workload increases or something unexpected happens. The checklist quietly takes care of the predictable, leaving the pilot free to focus on the unpredictable.

Perhaps the most profound example is Crew Resource Management, or CRM. It emerged after investigators noticed that many accidents weren’t being caused by technical failures or poorly trained pilots. Instead, they often came down to perfectly competent crews failing to communicate effectively under pressure. Junior crew members sometimes stayed silent. Senior captains sometimes became difficult to challenge. Important information existed in the cockpit, but never reached the person making the decision.

What the aviation industry eventually realised was that good communication couldn’t be left to chance. It couldn’t depend on personalities, confidence or experience alone. Instead, the industry began deliberately designing communication itself: the words people used, the moments they were expected to speak, the moments they were expected to listen, the way responsibility was handed over and the way important information was challenged and confirmed.

Good communication, in aviation, isn’t just a skill - it’s a system.

The connection I didn’t expect

I’ve known about these ideas for years, but what only struck me recently was how familiar they felt.

Before going any further, it’s probably worth acknowledging the obvious: designing a brand identity isn’t the same as flying an aircraft. A mistake in a cockpit can cost lives. A mistake in a social media graphic almost certainly won’t. That isn’t really the comparison I’m making.

What fascinates me is something much broader. One of the world’s most safety-critical industries has spent decades refining systems that help people communicate clearly, make good decisions under pressure and work together effectively. The more I reflected on those ideas, the more I realised that creative agencies spend an enormous amount of time trying to solve exactly the same problems.

Preserving judgement

As designers, we’re already obsessed with systems. We build grids so layouts don’t have to be reinvented. We establish typography, colour palettes, motion principles and component libraries so that every project doesn’t begin with a blank sheet of paper. We create brand guidelines that allow clients to make good decisions long after the original project has finished, not because every possible scenario has been anticipated, but because the principles behind those decisions have already been established.

I’ve always thought that describing a brand system as a collection of logos, colours and typography does it a bit of a disservice. A really good brand system is a way of preserving judgement. In many ways it’s our own version of a checklist—not a list of tasks to complete, but a collection of decisions that no longer need to be remade every time a new project begins.

It captures hundreds of small decisions so they don’t need to be made again under pressure, allowing another designer—or a client’s internal team—to spend their energy solving today’s communication problem rather than yesterday’s design problem. That’s what makes a system valuable. It quietly removes unnecessary cognitive effort, preserving time and attention for the problems that genuinely require creativity.

When things don’t go to plan

Pilot training doesn’t exist to prepare someone for an ordinary day at work. It exists to prepare them for the moment everything becomes a little less ordinary.

The same is true of a good brand system. Its value isn’t measured on the projects where everyone agrees on the brief and there’s plenty of time to think. It’s measured on the difficult days: when the deadline moves, when the messaging changes at the last minute, when a new designer joins the team or when another agency inherits the work years later.

That’s also what ties together everything I’ve been talking about throughout this article. “I have control.” Readbacks. Checklists. Crew Resource Management. On the surface they look like separate ideas, but they’re all really trying to achieve the same thing: making good decisions more likely by removing ambiguity, protecting attention and designing communication deliberately rather than leaving it to chance.

A good brand system does exactly the same. It captures decisions before they need to be made under pressure, creates a shared language for the people using it and allows talented designers to focus on solving the communication problem in front of them rather than repeatedly solving the same design problems over and over again.

After all, The checklist isn’t there to fly the plane - it’s there so the pilot can.

So fly the damn plane.