The CAA Safety Notice should be read carefully, evaluating critically what is written, opposed to what people might wish it to state.
The subject is pilot awareness of aircraft trim state, and safety interventions (relating to awareness).
It is concerned about inappropriate trim input or mishandling situations involving adverse trim conditions, particularly in aircraft with conventional control systems.
The recommended action is to identify gaps in training involving flying skills, knowledge, awareness, startle effect, etc.
This could be disingenuous criticism of those operations who have a robust training and safety systems; alternatively a necessary reinforcement of safety action questing aspects which might have been overlooked, particularly relating to recent accidents.
The notice is best read for what it is, a timely safety reminder.
Syllabus items are wide ranging, covering a number of safety issues all of which could challenge flying skills, but none specifically targeting awareness.
The primary subject - awareness, is often ill defined, difficult to quantify, as with most human factors issues.
How are lack of awareness, distraction, workload, or startle to be identified during training, and how related to trim.
If an aspect has been identified then how is this to be managed. As with most training and specifically human factors, the success from ‘trained for’ items cannot be guaranteed to be repeated in real situations, because of changing context.
No two situations are the same, nor pilots; the operational world is uncertain, defined by individual viewpoint.
Recent accidents, as with many previous events, remind us of the limitations of safety systems and training. Aircraft and systems can fail, as can humans, but so too the industry’s ability to imagine rare situations which have to be managed in real time, by real people in real aircraft. Also, we have a major limitation in understanding situations in hindsight, considering what incident pilots understood.
We must not allow the human dislike of uncertainty change our views of what situations could be encountered (oppose to those which were), or how these should be managed.
The important question - to self. Do I actually understand the situation, and not choose what I wish the situation to be; either in flight operations or just reading a safety notice