Originally Posted by
MechEngr
As to situational awareness, from that link to Endsley:
"In actual practice, however, long term memory structures can be used to circumvent the limitations of working memory. "
"Where scripts, set sequences of actions, have been developed for given situation conditions, much of the load on working memory for generating alternate behaviors and selecting among them is also diminished."
"Of prime importance is that this process can be almost instantaneous due to the superior abilities of human pattern matching mechanisms."
Where does the responsibility to commit sequences of actions and the underlying patterns to long term memory lie?
What if those materials were labeled as "Memory Items"? Should the users be expected to memorize them in proximity to a disaster that occurred recently?
What if the airline, recognizing they had taken no relevant training action or confirmation action, had parked the plane until Boeing produced the updated software or the pilots demonstrated what Endsley said was the appropriate action for them to have taken?
In hindsight it was a terrible idea to allow the AoA system to produce valid, but incorrect AoA data. In hindsight it was terrible the FAA approved that.
Am a fan of Mica's work, and the rest of the gang that have been dealing with ADM, NDM and SA for many years, enough to have had direct dialogue. If operational safety is to improve, it will likely come from better SA awareness & training in SA loss recognition and recovery, and analysis in events.
The decision making heuristics that give timely responses are great, when we are responding in a correct manner to the condition that exists, when we have failed to detect the problem, or incorrectly assumed consequence to that problem, then the training needs to have a pretty fast OODA like cycle embedded in it, that if doing what we think is the solution is not working, check again what the problem is, and then apply a response. In time critical situations, there is limited time to get a determination that what we are doing ain't working, so what we though was the case may not be so, or the intervention we apply was not as good as we expected it to be. If the review (we apply "confirmations", and for a rather high number of cases, "the verbal confirmation done ain't worth the paper it's not printed on....") is flawed, the response is likely to be flawed. The response can independently be incorrect, or not the sole option the pilot has. 90% of the time in the simulator covers "stuff" that is pure box ticking, covering day to day operations. The sim time applied to improving the decision making and SA awareness of the pilot is still underrepresented. Such training can be done effectively by PTT, or FBT, and is not a box tick, it is experiential expansion of the skills of the crew member.