What's Going On?

Accurate situational awareness is an essential component of safe piloting. It can be learned, and taught.

“Mentor Two Delta, confirm your flight level”. The clipped radio query from air traffic control came in the middle of an almost unbroken string of messages to and from other aircraft. In the brief second before my student Nick responded, we both did the same rapid scan across the panel: checking altimeter indications, pressure settings, and the transponder readout - which all confirmed Nick’s crisp reply: “maintaining flight level eight zero”. That seemed to be the end of the conversation, the busy area controller promptly addressing other traffic, to leave us in peace on our off-route IFR training flight. Well, not quite the end of it, because Nick felt the need to add a footnote to me over the intercom. “We reported that a couple of minutes ago when we levelled off. Did she forget?”

There was almost a hint of irritation in his voice, and my reply should have given Nick a tip that he needed to do a little deeper thinking: “No, she definitely didn’t forget”, I casually intoned. But all I got in response was an inattentive “OK”. His thoughts had progressed onward, unhindered by further curiosity about the controller’s query, to focus on our imminent descent and arrival at our destination airport. Now, this was the kind of moment I always find interesting in flight instruction - when a pilot hasn’t picked up an important clue in the stream of information that flows endlessly into and out of our purview, from which we can filter the nuggets relevant to our plan, our situation, our flightpath. So I teased him further with a quiet footnote of my own, while I gazed out my window into the middle distance. “Definitely. Didn’t. Forget”.

A moment passed. “Ah, crap” said Nick, I’m missing something, right”.

“Yep”, I replied, with a tad of amusement. Nick was an excellent student, a natural pilot, and I enjoyed challenging him to reach for ever-increasing standards in his flying.  “Your situational awareness just now could be a shade higher. Tell me, what was the last thing the controller said on the radio?”

“I... can’t remember”, he said hesitantly, “but anyway, it wasn’t for us”.  Even as he spoke the words, his head shook in acknowledgement that this was The Wrong Thing To Say. Poor Nick was snookering himself, so I yielded him a little mercy.

“Well, it wasn’t TO us, for sure, but it contained information that could affect us. Here, take a closer look at this. If you can’t figure it out, I’m sure all will be revealed shortly”. I handed him the en-route chart, and said no more, leaving him to work on the riddle for a minute or two without the benefit of repeating the ATC message (which had been a climb instruction to an airliner).

Developing a good sense of situational awareness - SA for short - is an essential element in the accomplished pilot’s repertoire of skills. As with many operational concepts, there is a degree of debate surrounding whether there is something special and identifiable about SA, or whether it’s just something the good pilots were doing all along. It can loosely be described as “knowing what is going on around you”. But one way or the other, many operators and trainers place emphasis on understanding and implementing the concept as thoroughly as possible. Airbus in its operational briefing notes, for example (following the seminal work of researcher Mica Endsley) defines SA as:

• The perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space.

• The comprehension of their meaning.
• The projection of their status in the near future.

In elaborating further on the components of SA, they identify Environmental Awareness (awareness of other aircraft, communications between ATC and other aircraft, weather or terrain); Mode Awareness (awareness of aircraft configuration and auto-flight system modes); Spatial Orientation (awareness of geographical position and aircraft attitude; System Awareness (awareness of status of aircraft systems) and Time Horizon (awareness of time management, for instance fuel status / monitoring, time factor in a smoke situation or emergency electrical configuration). Safety studies show that a lack of, or reduction in, SA is a pertinent factor in the majority of accidents which are attributed to “human error”. The notion of the mental model is a central component of SA: a dynamic picture in our mind of the present and upcoming realities of our unfolding situation, which, while being based on memory and experience, is updated by new inputs which we extract from the flow of information relentlessly coming our direction while we fly. When the mental model doesn’t conform with the real world, we are starting to lose situational awareness.

All or most of these factors were certainly present for my student Nick in the challenge I had posed him. One thing I have learned about ATC is that they rarely ask questions just for the heck of it. If, as in our case, they request that you repeat the same information you have just recently passed to them, it means they are reconfirming prior to taking some other action that indirectly involves you. And such, indeed, was the case. Having studied the chart for half a minute or so, Nick said, “well, all I can see is an ATS route across our path a few miles up ahead, and…. aha!, maybe another aircraft is….” but as he was about to speculate, no doubt correctly, the controller chimed in again. “Mentor Two Delta, traffic in your twelve o’clock, five miles ahead, passing left to right. Boeing 737 climbing through your level to flight level one seven zero”. As if on cue from an unseen aerial ballet master, we saw, in the distance, the beautiful airliner breaking through the cloud tops in its ascent to higher airspace. “Traffic in sight”, was Nick’s coda to this lovely minuet of the skies, as we watched the jet shoot rapidly out of view, into the bottom of the next layer. “Lesson learned”, he murmured, as he proceeded to his next task.

In the post-flight debrief, we discussed the idea of situational awareness at some length. Nick posed an interesting question: is SA something you just have naturally, or can it be learned? From the perspective of the instructor, that equates to, can it be taught? My own opinion is, yes it can. And it certainly can be cultivated. For a start, instructors should introduce the term into their students’ vocabulary, and give them some homework to research the concept, matching its ideas to their experiences in life generally, and more particularly within aviation. As the student’s experience of piloting evolves, and the mental models they develop of daily flying situations become more mature and informed by experience, their sense of SA in any given scenario will become more developed and reliable. A fruitful exercise to begin with, is to ask the student, when other tasks permit, to indicate the location and intentions of other traffic on the ground or in the air, based on recently overheard radio calls to and from those operators. It can be as simple as asking, e.g., “who is flying downwind at the moment, and where are they headed next?”.  That's just one example: creative instructors can develop innumerable exercises to quiz students and alert them to the importance of SA, in increasingly complex scenarios.

Another important lesson instructors can impart is that while is hugely important to have high SA, it can also be important to give SA in situations where you have picked up signs that other parties are not seeing the full picture. An example might be where ATC have routed another aircraft to a position where they already have you holding. Having heard the directions given, you might assume that, any moment now, you will be moved on to a position further down the route. But if that hasn’t happened and the other aircraft is getting uncomfortably close, it would be wise, in an appropriate gap in radio traffic, to announce your continuing hold at your existing location. That would have the effect of reminding the controller (should their attention have been momentarily diverted - it can happen!) that they need to deal with you imminently. It also puts the other pilot on notice that she or he needs to be alert to any possible conflict.

In the invisible tapestry we weave with our pathways through the air, good situational awareness guarantees that our own threads will be elegant and appropriate, and above all, will enhance safety. It’s one of those piloting qualities we can never have too much of, our guarantee to ourselves and others that we always know “what’s going on”.

-o0o-

A version of this article was first published in Flight Training News (U.K)