It was psychologist Mica Endsley who, late in the ’80s, developed a model of situational awareness with three primary components:
The roots for the concept of situational awareness can be found in the military, where it has historically been linked to effective decision-making in the tactical environment. To survive in combat is often a matter of observing the enemy’s current moves, predicting what he will do next, and reacting before he is able to do it. The military basic formula for SA is:
1. What’s happened
2. What’s happening
3. What might happen.
Today, situational awareness is a necessity in many different industries that require effective, real-time decision-making in complex, high-risk environments, from military and government and to public safety and transportation. This view broadly covers many aspects of the aeronautical decision making process in both air and ground crews.
To put it simply, situational awareness involves picking up cues from the environment, putting those cues together to understand what is going on, and using that understanding to predict what may happen next. Using the power curve of an engine as a metaphor, we know that as long as there’s a margin between power required and power available, the aircraft will keep flying. For situational awareness there must be a certain amount of “safety power” required from a particular circumstance, based on training, alertness and experience that the person can give. While this margin is there, the operator is evolving ahead of the situation. When there is not such a margin, the SA is lost.
Situational awareness is built up over time and is not instantaneous. Thus one needs to be trained or experienced. Another important component is situational awareness of shared elements amongst formation members for effective and safe team coordination
Human performance in dynamic situations is determined by situational awareness for effective decision making [4]. Situational awareness, thus, is not just a vital input for Decision Making but may impact the very process of decision making. It is the pilots’ understanding or characterizing of the unfolding situation that shall determine the choice of decision process as per his(her) evolving situational awareness. This in turn determines the performance, and still more importantly, the outcome – safe or fatal, as per the actions taken under compromised, incomplete, inadequate, or incorrect situational awareness [3].
During complex and dynamic environments, maintaining situational awareness in rapidly changing situation may, in turn, compromise the decision making, especially when the sensory inputs are at variance and perceptual conflicts could add to the stressful situation of maintaining a safe flight, thus adding to the mental workload. During such situations, perceptual conflicts can be resolved if the pilot’s situational awareness is accurate, the SOPs are straightforward, and there are no physiological or perceptual conflicts.
Before losing situational awareness, the operator has lost its own ability to know that he / she is not performing at the standard normally expected.
What will typically happen is that when the tunnel vision kicks in, the person is starting to miss cues about this sub-standard performance.
Additionally, the operator in troubles is frequently left unattended, as the team mates around are buried and self-centered on their own role.
People with good self awareness tend to have those little cues that kick in at the back of the head, warning that something just doesn’t feel right.
If there’s a bit of experience, or ego and/or complacency kicks in, this kind of person will step back and then ask some critical questions:
“What are we really doing and should we be doing it this way?”
“Is there a better way of doing this right given the pressure we’re under?”
After and incident, an accident or an airprox, it’s easy to say the pilot or the controller lost situation awareness. But what does that really mean at the time? How do we recognize we’ve lost situational awareness?… because one could argue that there must be a certain level of situational awareness to know that situational awareness has been lost.
It is said that loss of situational awareness takes place when there is “an interruption, an oversight, a hasty inference, or a decision based on incomplete knowledge or information…especially under conditions of heavy workload or tight temporal pressure” [2]. Among the several factors enumerated by Adams et al conducive to poor situational awareness, it must be underscored “working at one’s limit of capacity”, as exhausting own’s weakest ability leads to a wrong decision making process.
Situations of lost situational awareness entail slower detection of problems by the operators and worst still, need for extra time to analyze the situation parameters to reorient themselves. In case of a problem, there is delay in diagnosis [9], all at the cost of delay in taking critical corrective actions for recovery.
Doubts about situational awareness, absence of SOPs, physiological or cognitive conflicts, or a de novo situation faced by the operator, requires real time problem solving and decision making. More importantly, loss of situational awareness could occur due to breakdown of either of the two components of the decision process: ambiguity in situational assessment or uncertainty in choosing a course of action [5].
Among the many elements that Alkov et al [2] describe, there’s a common factor applicable to every staff involved in the air industry: training…
– By honing flying skills
– By taking care of personal health and attitude
– By applying crew / team resource management, using updated terminology (CRM / TRM)
– By using briefing / debriefing techniques
– By supervised exposure to ground based simulations, followed by in-flight situations, where the pilot and controller gain expertise for risk management, dynamic problem solving, attentional control and experience.
– By turning cognitive judgement into perceptual judgement, which is almost automatic. The more perceptual the judgement is, the bigger the margin to address unexpected situations.
This line of reasoning leads us to the field of “Decision Making”, where we have:
– Classical or normative Decision Making: training on the ground and in flight, starting with a theoretical background of data and information.
– Naturalistic Decision Making: where the crew utilizes the schema of a given prototypical situation (real or simulated to draw the long term memory and yields an almost spontaneous response to the identified/recognized situation.
Again, at the end of the process by making a decision, training turns out to be fundamental. We can develop our ability to improve situational awareness through preparation and planning, and that’s probably the biggest point we need to concentrate on is…
How do we do this?
References
1. Jensen RS, Guike J, Tigner R. Understanding expert aviator judgement. Chapter in Decision making under stress: Emerging themes and application. Flin R, Salas E, Strab M, Martin L (Editors). Aldershot:Ashgate, 1997: 233-242
2. Adams MJ, Tenney YJ, Pew RW. Situation awareness and the cognitive management of complex systems. Human Factors 1995;37(1): 85-104
3. Endsley MR. Toward a theory of situation awareness in dynamic systems. Human Factors 1995; 37(1): 32-64
4. Endsley MR, Kiris EO. The out-of-the-loop performance problem and level of control in automation. Human factors 1995; 37(2): 381-394
5. Orasanu J. Stress and naturalistic decision making: Strengthening the weak links. Chapter in Decision making under stress: Emerging themes and application. Flin R, Salas E, Strab M, Martin L (Editors). Aldershot:Ashgate, 1997: 43-66
