Situational Awareness Training
By
Doug Edwards
This is a paper briefly outlining a training module I use with Australian civilian trainee pilots. The Situational Awareness (SA) training is one module of a 16 module course on what I call the pilot’s ‘personal safety factor’. The rationale behind my training course is that we all possess innate safety factors, comprising knowledge skills and attitudes, and all can be improved upon through work. That is, through learning and exercise, we can build on our natural abilities, enhance our safety skills and knowledge, at any stage of a pilot career.
This is a ‘snapshot’ — a module excerpted from a cohesive course — and there are dependencies on other materials. However, I’m pretty sure that there’s enough in here to stand alone as useful guidelines for training. Please feel free to comment, especially to challenge. I don’t have any problem with having to defend my work.
I must say at the outset, I am not a psychologist. I’m a private pilot, and former fighter pilot, flying instructor and accident investigator. My current aircraft is Cessna 170, a taildragger. I am active on the Executive Committee of the Aviation Safety Foundation Australia. (As a fighter instructor, I once flew with, and counted as a good friend, a USAF Captain Mike Ryan. Whatever happened to Michael E Ryan, I wonder?)
All of the above adds up to a large culture gap between where I am and where you are. However, on the airfield where I operate, there are cultural differences even between one flying school and another. (A good analogy is to compare the culture of a fighter squadron with that of a transport outfit. Same air force, speak the same version of English, but...)
My training design accommodates different cultures by placing the onus of program development on the individual. That’s done through using a cycle of: accident review - expound some theories about possible cause (pathogen) of the accident - apply theory to further accidents - when convinced, use theory to train yourself in counter-pathogen strategies. In other words, there are principles to be found in my training that apply universally. The challenge to you is to discover them, work out how they function in your cockpit, for yourself, then build your own program based on the underlying principles. There will be other initiative tests, such as to locate and get access to reference texts. Handing over.
Before moving on, some credits: Keith Hendy has, from time to time, in the Industry CRM Developers Group debate, mentioned the Information Processing/Perceptual Control Theory (IP/PCT). He has a paper on it that I rely on heavily, so it’s in your interest to get a copy from him. Keith’s ideas have been of tremendous assistance to me in fleshing out my own early attempts at making sense of much of this. My own theories can be found in my book, ‘Fit to Fly — Cognitive Training for Pilots’ (FtF), which is available from: http://www.caar.db.erau.edu/crm/bookstore/edwards/edwards.html.
I am also indebted to Vince Mancuso for his paper on Thorndike’s Laws of Learning, to Tony Kern for engaging in a stimulating and challenging debate over the past year or so, to Mark Pitt for some provocative and intelligent supplements to my arguments, and to Neil Krey for organising a major contribution to both our professional development and flight safety everywhere — the Industry CRM Developers Group. Finally, everyone who contributes to the crm-devel debate deserves recognition for their interest, thought-provoking comments, and keeping the thing going.
Learning SA
SA can be described as taking up information from a number of sources according to a pattern, or ‘scan’. When you are on downwind in the circuit, for example, you will ‘switch’ where you look, between key sources of information — ahead, for visual attitude, the instrument panel for speed, heading, the runway for distance out, alignment, and so on. An analogy is a number of buckets on a table, each containing balls of a different colour. You have to take a ball from each bucket according to a certain sequence.
Pilots learn SA as they learn to fly. They learn it intuitively, on what can be called a ‘need to know’ basis. When you need to know your heading, you look at the compass. The SA scan pattern that’s appropriate for mid-downwind, will be different from that of the base turn, the approach to landing, and so on. So, as we learn to fly, we learn dozens of different scan patterns.
When you think about it, this is ‘incidental’ learning. You fly a circuit to learn to fly a circuit, and how to land the plane, not to learn an SA scan. The latter is a by-product of the former. Yet, strong SA skill is crucial to safe flight. Surely, you would think, something so important would be learned as a deliberate objective. Not only that, as it is that important, it should be learned separately, not while competing with something as intensely absorbing as how to control flight. (Check Thorndike’s Laws of Primacy and Intensity.)
And there’s another thing. Flying is disciplined. We have checklists, standardised flight patterns, all sorts of rules on how to do things according to sequences. So where are the checklists for SA scan? Where are the standard patterns? To return to the coloured balls analogy, you could devise a pattern where a red ball had to be selected first, then a yellow, back to red again, to yellow, red and yellow again, before moving on to a blue and so on. For the different colours, substitute flight parameters, fuel state, track-keeping tasks, etc. Everything does not need the same amount of attention, nor must every parameter be checked in turn.
Not only that, but different information needs take different times to satisfy — and getting the reading will require different strategies depending on the circumstances. Say, you need to let your look dwell on an instrument to get a reading, fuel state, for example. A quick glance is not enough to register. You have to look for a finite amount of time. That’s fine, unless you happen to be doing something that needs most of your attention outside, like low flying, or formation aerobatics. Then the best you can do is a series of glances, accumulating the picture, the reading.
You could surmise that there really is only the one optimum scan pattern for every situation in flight, and that it will be susceptible to formal design and teaching. Just think about it. You don’t even have to be in the plane. You sit down and work out the order in which you take up the information, the pattern you will follow for each given situation
So let’s put that into practice. First, remind yourself of Thorndike’s Law of Exercise. Competence comprises knowledge and skills. SA scanning is a skill. Skills are only learned and kept in shape by exercise. You have to do something. Now is the time. And I stress this. Now is the time to do something. Do your preparation (plan your exercise), then put this aside and execute your plan. Do it. Just reading about skills is not enough. You have to exercise them.
Here’s how: You are going to spend a small amount of time in your vehicle practising SA — through a deliberate SA scan. Sit in your car and mentally list the knowledge elements your are going to acquire and where you are going to get them from. Heading control - look distant, then look close. Position in traffic - look right, look left, rear view. Vital statistics - speed, fuel state, oil pressure, temperature, electrical charge, and so on.
If it is a gauge you will be getting a reading from, check how long your look must dwell on the instrument to get a reading. Check out the strategy of a series of quick glances, alternating between looking ahead and inside, how many glances do you need to assemble reading. If it is a warning light, you’ll just be checking - ‘light not illuminated’. Once you have a complete list of required information, and noted each information-supply source, build up a plan to visit each source in a sensible and rational sequence.
Imagine it’s going to be a straight leg on a country road, some traffic but not a lot. You’re going to need to spend most of your time looking outside, and mostly ahead at that. Looks to the right and left will occur maybe once in six forward looks, all being interspersed with checks on speed, engine information, etc. (If your car is so automated it has few such things to check, throw in some tasks such as adjusting stereo settings, dialling out on a mobile or car phone.) Once you have assembled one complete ‘cycle’ run a test of it. Actually do the scan, modifying it as you go, until you have something workable. Practise a few more times, then take it out on the road and test it. Once you’ve done that, sit down in a quiet place and work out a few SA scan patterns that you will be able to use in your aeroplane.
Motivation
Have you actually done that? Great if you have, but it doesn’t matter if you chose to read on. That’s because I have to deal with the matter of motivation anyway. (No separate Thorndike Law, here, but implicit in ‘Readiness’.) Motivation. People like Steven Covey and Edward de Bono circle the globe peddling motivation, positive thinking, you can be better then you are, just do this...
They tend to tell stories of folk who have achieved wonderful things under self-powered incentive. Yet the truth is that these spruikers bring little change into the lives of the people who go to their seminars. Actually achieving change in life habits is extraordinarily difficult.
The main reason is this: for every positive statement you make in your mind — ‘I can jump ten feet’ — there is an immediate answer from within — ‘No you can’t.’
In any attempt at harnessing the undoubted power of self-motivation, you need to dissipate any possible influence of the negative force, get the mental cynic to say, ‘Sure you can,’ instead of, ‘No you can’t.’ At the very least, give the doubter the chance to be able to say, ‘I believe you can,’ or, ‘Let’s give it a go.’ And you need to do that at the very instant the negative message is about to surface, which will be immediately after the positive statement. That’s when you head it off.
And that’s another skill. Here’s how to practise it in your design and exercise of the SA scan in your car, and as you plan SA scan patterns to be used in flight.
List the negative messages that crop up as you sit there working out your SA scan pattern. Yours might differ, but in my case, they usually include, ‘This is too complicated, besides, you’ve been driving for years without needing it.’ It’s when I start imagining using a similar scheme in a plane that the negative messages swell to a chorus. The possible combinations stretch out, become limitless. Let’s see, what is the best SA (information search) scan for the top of a loop, cloud break on ILS finals, mid-downwind on a low level, assymetric, circuit. You’d go mad trying to work out a scan for every situation in such a dynamic environment.
All of which adds up to a general, ‘What’s the point?’ sort of feeling, a powerful brake on doing it, a serious disincentive to proceed with the exercise..
The Point
On 8 September 1994 a USAir Boeing 737 rolled to nearly inverted. You may know the accident details. The Flight Data Recorder reveals that the first pilot response was to pull full backstick. There was no attempt to roll off the bank before introducing the elevator control. The Cockpit Voice Recorder provides evidence of overwhelming apprehension. The general opinion is that appropriate recovery action would have prevented the crash, and the loss of 132 lives.
This is a classic illustration of SA breakdown. It is also an example of what I call the ‘Cognitive Collapse’, a pathogen I stalk through the first third of my book, with my conclusions as to causes laid out from page 62 through to page 66.
Here’s a brief synopsis of the theory. Your ‘cognitive computing power’ is limited, and the conscious (the bit you can control) mind is single-channel. I’ll deal with the first proposition first — capacity.
Mark Pitt of Air New Zealand has pointed out that a ‘cognitive capacity’ analogy can be made with RAM in a computer. You load some program into RAM, and there is spare space. Put some more in, the spare space diminishes. The main purpose of DOS was to ensure some spare space always remained, that, if a lot of program had to be taken up, some other program was downloaded out of RAM, to make way, to ensure space-plus-margin was available. That’s important as, if you were to fill the RAM up altogether, you will ‘jam’ the computer, there being no space left even for the instruction to unload something. It’s stalled.
SA breakdown can be seen to follow a similar pathway. Let’s now follow it.
The conscious mind being single-channel is why we have to allocate time to the attention given each source in a search for information from dispersed sources. In this illustration, the time allocated to each information source is equal. You are looking at each information supply source, for the same amount of time.
However, we know that’s not realistic, as we need to look for longer periods for some data uptake.
| Attitude | Height | Distance out |
This is a fairly crude method of illustration. That’s partly so as not to introduce complex mixtures of Drawing formats within the WP file and hence the potential for glitches in transmission. (You can imagine for yourself what tasks to assign to the smaller allocations of time.)
More important, it is because I’d like you to draw up your own, using a familiar setting, again, say, mid-downwind in the circuit. Allocate time — figuratively, not real-time — needed to pick up each element of information, distance out, speed, heading, height, fuel state, visual attitude, aircraft configuration, and so on.
As I’ve already mentioned, we learn information-search scans on a ‘need to know’ basis. More, we readily automate scan patterns. Part of the discomfort with the Car-driving SA scan exercise I asked you to think about earlier is that I’m pushing you to do something difficult, when the easy option is to let the automatics run the show, just use the existing scan habits.
Indeed, in terms of not overloading RAM — cognitive capacity — it is very much in a pilot’s interest to automate as much as is possible. In Keith Hendy’s writing, he has pointed out that the more technically competent pilots and crews display superior situational awareness. It makes sense, doesn’t it? The more you have automated — the multitude of hand movements that comprise flying, for instance — the more conscious processing power is available for other tasks.
Further, if I ask you to switch your SA scan control from automated to conscious, then that is a time demand. Using the same diagram above, every segment of available time is allocated. To impose an additional demand for control, the conscious mind being single channel, it’s got to displace some other information-gathering. And, using the RAM analogy, if you are operating at the limit, you might well overload the system, jam the computer, experience ‘cognitive collapse’.
| Control | Height | Distance out |
The Pittsburgh accident exemplifies gross loss of SA. We are, as pilots, more familiar with the less catastrophic ‘tunnel vision’ phenomenon. It is usually transient, occurring when, for some reason, the scan breaks down, and the look dwells on a single information source for too long, gazing without purpose far longer than needed just to acquire information.
Well, the reason can now be made clear. Lets say, using the above diagram, that the SA scan locks up with you staring at the altimeter. You have thus disabled the automated scan pattern. Not only that, as the pattern relies on repetition, you having stalled it, you don’t even have access to the conscious control function. The mind is single channel. Once the switching stops, you are no longer allocating time to tasks such as SA scan control.
Which takes me back to the exercise in your car. (No car? You can do the same thing on a bicycle. The whole point of this sort of training is self-exploration leading to useful conclusions that you can translate into stronger safety skills in flight. Once you can see the principles, you can apply them in a wide variety of exercises. Be adventurous. Push yourself.)
When you get around to doing it — and you must — two things will become clear. The first is that the mental cynic is right. An SA scan is far too complicated to design and execute at the level of intimate, step-by-step detail. However, the fact that you are imposing a level of conscious control over your information-gathering scan means, that you are far more richly supplied with SA data than you had been previously. You are more alert, and you will be finding out things well before you need to know them. You have achieved a superior form of situational awareness — and a much higher safety factor overall.
Indeed, when you perform this exercise, you will reveal to yourself that the intuitively-learned scan pattern, the ‘need-to-know’ number, is quite ‘lazy’. It’s a bit like mandated minimums in recurrent training. As Vince Mancuso has pointed out, if the FAA says that every pilot must spend at least one hour in a particular exercise each quarter, then that also becomes the industry standard, the maximum as well as the minimum. Yet, if one hour is good, then surely two is better, and so on.
An Important Skill
Which gets me back to where I started. SA scan is essentially time allocated to attention paid to information sources. SA scan control is a skill. The chances are you learned SA scan control incidentally, as a by-product of the many experiences that comprise learning to fly. Whether that is good enough is neither here nor there. The important aspect of non-deliberate training is that you may have automated sub-optimal scan patterns. You can only assess that by practising conscious control over scan patterns. In doing that, you will be significantly upgrading your ‘learned’ (sub-conscious) patterns and enhancing your overall situational awareness.
Here’s another exercise you can use to investigate how the time control function works in you. Take two golf balls and practise juggling them with one hand. Once you get good at it, do it while walking around. Alternatively, stand near a desk where there are three coins stacked. While juggling with one hand, use the other to move the coins, one by one, from the present stack to a new stack a few inches away.
I won’t pre-empt too many of your own conclusions, but here’s one tip. If you throw the balls higher, you have more time to switch attention between each as you need to track them. To put yourself under some pressure, throwing the balls less high will force you to up the pace, increase the scan rate — and the adrenalin factor will rise. That also demonstrates the onset of stress, and it’s power to diminish skill performance.
Once you have checked out the exercises I have recommended — or designed your own and done them — then go through some accident reports looking for SA breakdown. Put yourself in the position of the pilot flying, and evaluate what factors might have enabled you to withstand the pressures that he or she may have succumbed to.
Remember your mental cynic, the Doubting Thomas, Mr ‘No you can’t’? Skills are enhanced through practice. Once you have done a lot of practice, you can counter his negative input with the certainty that your state of preparation has rendered you exceedingly fit in these practices.
There’s a parallel with physical fitness. I do a 10 kilometer ‘fun’ run every so often. I like to get in under the 50 minute mark. Nothing special, just a personal goal. But it is somewhat faster than my normal training speed. When I say to myself, ‘I can do that,’ it is a credible proposition. I know I can because I have trained long and hard enough.
That’s what you need to be able to do when on the brink of confusion due to the intense pressures every pilot will experience sooner or later. You need to know that, when you go to bring conscious control to your SA scan, not only that you can do it, but that you can do it very efficiently indeed. You’ll only get there by practice.
Indeed, I make a lot, in my book (and continuing pilot training work) of the essentiality of pilots to be both physically fit — at the end of a long flight, and a long duty day, the fitter you are the better placed you will be to withstand the skill-degrading effects of fatigue — and the more ‘cognitively fit’ you are, the better your ability to maintain good decision skills under stress. Go through accident reports for exapmles of pilots who just ‘gave up’, or who failed to cope because of the extreme emotional load they encountered. There is a legitimate public expectation that pilots will be tougher than that. You’ll only get there with hard exercise.
And that toughness is the basis for your self-confidence — the credibility that you accord your positive, ‘I can...’ statements, along with the strength of the knowledge you possess, that you plan to rely upon. This level of confidence is so vital that it is my view, we all should submit to routine tests of it — of our ability to manage and maintain a sound SA scan, under stress.
The WOMBAT test is the one I use to check myself. It asks you to manage simultaneously a number of demanding tasks, and is, in my view, sufficiently searching to comprise my own self-confidence base. You may have another form of test you can use for the same purpose. If not, invent/use more exercises (I’ll be happy to send some more), as developing that confidence may well be the key to your survival.
I also subject myself to a stress tolerance test every six months or so, through abseilling. As you back out over the cliff, you have to keep control over a sequence of movements, according to a ‘checklist’. I thus confirm my ability to follow a checklist, and maintain SA, under anxiety.
Finally, if it appears that my focus has been entirely on single pilot operations, then that is not the case. The person co-ordinating crew functions is simply allocating time to tasks for more than just him or herself. Their ability to do that well will be greatly enhanced through the practice routines I advocate. Firstly, individual self-exploration and practice, and then with the crew you will fly with.
Copyright © 1996-2005 by Neil C. Krey unless otherwise indicated.
Non-commercial reproduction rights granted if the following notice is included:
"Source: Neil Krey's CRM Developers Forum, http://www.crm-devel.org"