“… recommendations that a surprise or startle factor should be introduced into routine simulator training. While this sounds like yet another buzzword like CRM and TEM, the concept has its limitations.”
“… the new fad for deliberately setting up a startle or surprise event is counter- productive and contrary to good instructional technique.“ There is a trend in the industry to take up salient findings or recommendations from recent accidents without due consideration. This could reflect the current level of safety, and the difficulty of improvement - ‘just do something’; which can suffer bias from seeking success and inability to quantify improvement. Also, training appears to be expedient and less costly than addressing the environmental contributions to surprise - system failures, ambiguous situations, conflicts with SOPs.
“…
forget you're in the sim.”
It is probably impossible to deeply startle / surprise humans in simulation. Theme parks and ‘thrill rides’ generate necessary effects of situation surprise, but never create a fear of dying as could happen during flight. ‘Fear potential startle’ (Martin).
‘Fundamental Surprise’; - “
A fundamental surprise reveals a profound discrepancy between one's perception of the world and the reality.” (James Reason). Something which cannot be conceived as reality.
"
fundamental surprise often is denied ... redefine the incident as if only a situational surprise ... leading to denial of any need to change or to attribution of the “cause” to local factors with well-bounded responses". (David Woods)
Scenario training could inadvertently strengthen bias towards situational surprise - redefine the situation as one which I have been trained for, and from that I have understanding, except you don’t. Similarly in an SOP culture, rushing (by rote) to fit an SOP to a situation where there is no SOP.
Also there is no guarantee that the training and actions will be recalled when surprised, because the emotional state diminishes cognitive capacity, difficulty in recall and acting.
The industry must focus the circumstances of surprise; aircraft system failures, environmental aspects.
‘
How might pilots react to MCAS activation’; - after modifying the aircraft so that a system failure minimises the need for pilot intervention, minimise the risk of surprise.
AF 447 - all pitots modified; new independent speed display BUSS; less opportunity for failure and surprise.
For the human, education, knowledge, confidence, self efficacy - that for most situations in aviation someone has been there first - flight test , or simulated it - evaluation, or thought about it - regulation; except in those very rare instances when they didn’t - so then fix the process.
https://www.rizoomes.nl/fundamental-...an-een-crisis/ Translation required from Dutch, but well worth the effort.