Originally Posted by
safetypee
737 Driver, Uplinker,
‘Loss of situational awareness’
How do you know that you have lost awareness; compare this with an illusion. Awareness exists, unfortunately it doesn’t match the real situation, nor therefore the actions required. Do you have an illusion of understanding these accidents. If you have lost something, what was ‘this’ which you already had. How did you acquire it in the first instance.
Okay, those last two questions border on some deep metaphysical issues, so let’s just say that when a flight crew first steps into the cockpit at the gate that they should have a good sense of where they are, what day it is, where they are going, what they had for breakfast, etc. Otherwise, we are all pretty much screwed.
Let’s start again with the mantra: When presented with an undesired aircraft state, unknown malfunction or ambiguous warning, or a loss of situational awareness, the flying pilot should be ready and able to:
Turn off the Magic, Set the Pitch, Set the Power, Trim the Aircraft, Monitor the Performance, and Move the Aircraft to a Safe Altitude.
Loss of situational awareness is just
one of the entry conditions, though it is an important one. You don’t even need to have an active aircraft malfunction. Many years ago, a crew at my airline was doing a descent and arrival into a South American airport in a non-radar environment with high terrain and thunderstorms in the area. This was in the days before EGPWS and navigation display screens. At some point while trying to maneuver around the weather, the Captain realized that he no longer knew what his position was in relation to the surrounding the terrain, so he immediately disconnected the autopilot and autothrottles, set the pitch and power for a max performance climb, and climbed to a safe altitude. Once there, they reestablished SA and started the arrival anew. It is very possible that this Captain saved the lives of everyone onboard.
Back to the mantra. The preamble is “When presented with an undesired aircraft state, an unknown malfunction or ambiguous warning, or a loss of situational awareness...” These are conditional statements joined by the word “or”. You only need one of them to apply the mantra.
The mantra continues, “the flying pilot should be ready and able to...” It does not actually say the flying pilot
must do the following. If the flying pilot has enough SA to apply a different and more appropriate procedure, then that is what he/she should do. Now this leaves open the possibility that the pilot misidentifies the malfunction and applies the wrong corrective action. Hopefully, this is where the non-flying pilot steps in with a sanity check. There is no evidence in this accident that the crew misidentified the malfunction and were applying the wrong non-normal procedure.
However, if the flying pilot is 1) presented with an undesired aircraft state, and 2) does not know what the cause of that aircraft state is (i.e. unknown malfunction or ambiguous warning), then that person has pretty much met the definition of loss of situational awareness
whether they know it or not. In that case, in the absence of any other procedure that would apply, the flying pilot should
Turn off the Magic, Set the Pitch, Set the Power, Trim the Aircraft, Monitor the Performance, and Move the Aircraft to a Safe Altitude.
Somewhere along the way, they may either come to realize that they have lost SA, or better yet, they will regain SA so that they can properly address the situation. Either way, by applying the steps above (i.e. FLY THE AIRCRAFT), they will have greatly improved their position.