“Traffic one o’clock, 1,000 feet below, appears to be climbing, unverified, type unknown”
Any pilot who hears this call from ATC would be sitting up straight and studying the skies around them. The pilot focuses on discovering the traffic yet with their attention divided they don’t see that they have not leveled off at a previously assigned altitude and are descending – towards the traffic they are trying to identify. In their descent, their airspeed begins to climb and the closure rate between the two converging aircraft increases – separation is lost.
Situational awareness (or SA) is often spoken of in aviation and it’s necessity is obvious in the above example. SA is found in nearly every aspect of aviation and in most our daily lives. We can easily recall tragic examples when it was lost and the consequences far reaching and life-changing. We call for ourselves and fellow professionals to always maintain it, yet we seldom talk about how to attain it. How to train for it.
It’s all well and good to say “SA is important! Be great at it!” And those things are both true, but how does one get better at it? How do you train for SA?
Rehearse
In aviation this is commonly referred to as “Chair Flying” or using a “Paper Tiger” is another example of this. Rehearsal begins with basic forms of flying: flows, checklists – normal procedures. This allows your brain to build habits, known movements and neural pathways to complete these systematic movements and behaviors without taxing your reasoning systems, the decision making portions of your brain. Once these movements become almost robotic for you, you are able to perform these tasks in high-stress environments while allowing your brain to see a wider picture of what is happening around you and therefore make the safest, most appropriate decision for that specific situation [The Neuroscience of Habit and Purposeful Behavior // How to Rewire your Brain]. Practice your normal flows. Practice your checklists. Rehearse your normal procedures. Over and over. Start slow and deliberate, precise and clear. The more your practice the faster you will get. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast is the common cliche here.
Once the basic forms have been rehearsed and are becoming more automatic, then you begin to add abnormal procedures. In aviation, this would include things like “emergency descent procedures” applicable to whatever airframe you are in or “partial power failure” in a given power plant or any other abnormal procedure you can think of. The trick here is to continue your rehearsal of normal procedures while beginning to add abnormal procedure rehearsal into the mix. Most aircraft manufacturers or operators will include abnormal procedure memorization behaviors in documents. Use these first as they are likely the most important procedures to know.
Learn to Improvise
Improvisation in aviation. Scary, I know. It’s important to remember that improvisation always happens within the bounds of a given sandbox. In aviation our sandbox is quite obvious – physics (safety, can my airplane actually do what I need it to do), procedures (does the operation in which I work allow for me to do this) and laws (is this even legal). Naturally, you might have to break procedure and law in very rare circumstances, but in most of those instances there are contextual pieces that allow for this.
With your flows heavily practiced and rehearsed, with your abnormal procedures nearly automatic, now you can play the “what if?” game. This is where you learn to improvise. Come of with scenarios that you now can respond to and how you would do so. In the example above, think about what it would look like to have to maneuver to avoid traffic you saw at the last second to narrowly avoid a mid-air. Do this on the ground as much as possible.
Build the Muscle
Build your situational awareness muscle. It is something you can train, teach and grow at. You just have to work at it. As you do this more and more on the ground you will begin to find that your brain will do this faster and dynamically as you move through the world. You’ll do this as you drive, as you fly, as you push your shopping car around the store. You’ll begin to see ways your actions cause chain reactions, consequences and changes in your environment. This happens in the flight deck and everywhere in your life.
So rehearse your normal procedures, flows and checklists so they become automatic. Build in abnormal procedures and other emergency memory items in your rehearsal. Do this on the ground as much as you can. As these grow more automatic, begin playing the “what if?” game and then chair fly these scenarios. If you’re in a flight deck with another pilot, this is a great game to play with each other as it will test your systems, physics and procedural knowledge well.
The bottom line is: Situational Awareness is a requirement for aviation and is a superpower in your life. The more situationally aware you are, the better off you will be. You will not have any classes in your aviation educational journey that will teach you SA, yet you’ll hear how important it is frequently. Systems knowledge is easy, memorize text and copy, numbers and graphs – or simply know where to look. IFR knowledge is book knowledge. These things are simple to teach and to learn. SA will save lives, knowing what page to find a performance chart in a book somewhere likely won’t.
Other helpful studies on how the brain works if you want to nerd out:
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