My original questions addressed ‘monitoring and intervention’ as a single process, but on reflection the examples were all biased towards awareness within monitoring.
PJ2 and
Tee Emm identified cultural weaknesses in intervention as a separate issue, similarly in later debates, monitoring is identified as a separate issue.
Updating my views, I believe that monitoring and intervention can be considered as independent safety processes, but the need for intervention results from an output of monitoring. Both involve situation assessment, awareness, and decision making. Intervention is concerned mainly with communicating.
MountainBear raised an interesting view with “the difference between active and passive monitoring”.
I had not previously considered this idea; I am not sure what the difference between them is.
However, thinking about it, together with the debate on SOPs, then perhaps active monitoring represents the ‘by rote’ calls required by SOP – standard crosschecks.
Passive monitoring represents the general overview and comparison required in all operations.
Or vice versa???
Does the process of crosschecking (active monitoring?) really involve awareness (understanding)? Usually only a single parameter is considered, and the response is a ‘canned’ yes/no, go/no go, or confirmation value.
The alternative process (passive monitoring?) should involve the wider situation – ‘plane, path, people’. This will require all aspects of situation awareness; seeing, understanding, and projecting ahead.
The need for intervention – questioning, alerting, warning, arises where one or more items in the situation do not match the planned (expected) situation, i.e. there is a mismatch in the crew’s mental models. This would appear to be most relevant in abnormal or unexpected situations.
There may also be some similarities with the ideas of tactical and strategic awareness, i.e. what’s happening now (tactical) and what might happen – thinking ahead (strategic).
Thus the original questions could be reconsidered as:-
- Does crosschecking work? and
- Do the ‘by rote’ callouts really provide an alerting function?
.
- Does passive monitoring work? and
- Does intervention really work in rare unexpected situations?
But these still leaves the question ‘is the monitoring / intervention concept flawed?’ unanswered.