The problem of the blind spot can show up in any system with misreading instruments, hidden equipment, and a sluggish response to the controls. The problem grows much worse when crews don't know how little they are seeing into the machine, and then in a crisis they eroneously cobble up a theory and stick to it against all evidence.

They were experiencing what sociologist Karl Weick calls vu jade (the opposite of deja vu), the profoundly frightening impression that the world no longer makes sense and that one has blundered into a place or circumstance so alien that one has never been there before. Weick quotes Freud on this: 'a gigantic and senseless fear is set free' when things get bad enough.