How do you "teach" SA?

[ACJcentral]

So presumably you have a better understanding than the collection of experienced professional pilots posting above.

Ah presumption, the cause of many an accident! Should I presume then that in relation to SA you place great importance and value on experience and the holding of a professional licence?.

KLM certainly did, well at least until Sunday, March 27, 1977 they did, after trying to phone Captain Jacob Veldhuyzen van Zanten to investigate an accident he had just caused.

As a new instructor Genghis you should be able to give us the benefit of your course notes on SA together with a brief summary of how to teach it.

[mad_jock]

As a new instructor Genghis you should be able to give us the benefit of your course notes on SA together with a brief summary of how to teach it.

Its not covered in The flight instructors course.

Its also not covered in the CRMI course.

And its also not covered in the CORE course for TRI.

Not covered in the Line trainers course either.

To be honest you sound like another walter mitty who posts in instructors thinking that they have a clue when they don't.

[Genghis the Engineer]

Well said Jock.

G

[ACJcentral]

To be honest MJ you sound like one of those people who think name calling is part of logical argument and discussion or comes as an entitlement for being an experienced professional pilot. Forgive me if I choose not take part in such juvenile behaviour, not that there would be any need as I am sure everyone else can work out for themselves what you are.

I haven't had the benefit of being able to read every companies training syllabus for the various courses you mention, you obviously work for the CAA and have read them all.

However to fill in the gaps in your knowledge i would refer you to

CAP 737 Crew Resource Management (CRM) Training
Guidance For Flight Crew, CRM Instructors (CRMIS) and CRM Instructor-Examiners (CRMIES)

The purpose of this publication is to provide a comprehensive guidance document on Crew Resource Management (CRM), from a UK perspective and in this document you will find 34 references to SA, which you claim isn’t part of the CRM syllabus.

This document is also a good starting point for anyone interested in finding out about SA which is a part of threat and error management (TEM) and is required to be taught for all Part FCL licences.

All FI course candidates are required to have passed the professional exams which includes human factors and which of course includes SA, TEM and aviation decision making. The course teaches the candidate to teach, its not supposed to re teach any of the technical subjects so therefore HF may not be specifically mentioned in the syllabus!

On tbe completion of the course the FI is supposed to be able to teach all the subjects associated with the licence being taught. All PPL instructors should be able to teach any aspect of human performance and limitations that is required for the part fcl licence.

[Genghis the Engineer]

We can all look stuff up online. To my certain knowledge Jock lives and breaths this stuff - as do I.

What are your qualifications and understanding of SA and how to teach it? Perhaps you coukd say something constructive before we all put you ignore.

G

[mad_jock]

That's just confirmed my suspicion.

Your current log in can go and join your other walter mitty log in on my ignore list.

You obviously have zero clue about the current course structure or content. The term situational awareness is used and referred to as a good thing but as such there is no syllabus for teaching it.

And please note I won't be seeing your reply just like I don't see your other posts under your other login.

[Conan the Vulgarian]

Can you give specific examples of what he's struggling with, or times he has fallen short?

I agree to some extent with what was said earlier about it being down to flying experience - the more experience you have, the lower your workload becomes in a given situation, and the less likely you are to succumb to fixation on one task to the detriment of noticing what else is going on. Proper planning helps as well of course - the better you've prepared, the less you have to think about at the time, and the more you can take in what's going on around you.

If that's what you mean by a lack of SA (ie. that he fixates on tasks and doesn't seem to have the spare mental capacity to notice other things at the same time), the only way I suppose you can teach it is to encourage him to divide his attention widely, to keep scanning through different tasks, doing things a little bit at a time. It may be that encouraging this actually diminishes his ability to cope at first, and that you have to deliberately overload him somewhat by "distracting" him from one task to ask him to attend to another.

It's an interesting question though, and I'll be keeping an eye on this discussion to see if you can elaborate on exactly what you mean by a lack of SA, and what other more experienced FIs think can be done to improve it.

[ACJcentral]

What MJ said was:

Its not covered in The flight instructors course.

Its also not covered in the CRMI course.

And its also not covered in the CORE course for TRI.

Not covered in the Line trainers course either.

Which is totally wrong, below for instance is Globals CRMI Course

Global Air Training
CRMI COURSE
Day Three
Delegate practical delivery (info processing, situational awareness, implications & management of conflict, decision making, workload, leadership)
Case study analysis linking to Human error & TEM

Any pilot, instructor or otherwise, who thinks SA is not part of CRM should not be anywhere near an aircraft.

Genghis, you would do well to spend some time on the internet trying to find out what SA is rather than advising students to use an airfield scanner, unless you are a stand up comedian as well.

[ACJcentral]

This is what a FI is supposed to be qualified to teach Genghis

From a PPL syllabus

Judgement and decision making

concepts of pilots' judgement
psychological attitudes
behavioural aspects
risk assessment
development of situational awareness

[mad_jock]

If you do a search for "NASA pilot situational awareness" you get a heap of hits from current research.

This message is hidden because ACJcentral is on your ignore list.

And the utter rubbish stops.

Anyway

I will throw this in

http://www.satechnologies.com/Papers...ingchapter.pdf

[ACJcentral]

Referencing other material on the internet, splendid, there you are MJ you could be an instructor after all. All you need to to do now is loose the juvenile attitude.

Two excellent references.

Welcome to 2013 Genghis and the internet, available in virtually every UK pilots home and the greatest advance in education since the dip pen.

[BBK]

ACJCentral

You were the only person to post a snotty response and now you're lecturing the rest of us on CRM! Oh the irony.

BBK

[ACJcentral]

You were the only person to post a snotty response and now you're lecturing the rest of us on CRM! Oh the irony

And of course your response, personally directed at me, with no bearing on the discussion, is an example of first class CRM! Oh the irony

[BBK]

ACJCentral

I've reread your original post and yes I think it was "snotty". Purely my own highly subjective view of course. However, what I and everyone else did was offer some ideas to the OP. Nothing more or less. Not good enough for you then that's your concern. I sincerely hope the OP derived some benefit from our input.

BBK

[fwjc]

ACJCentral

Whereabouts do you instruct? I like your direct approach and it's clear you know more than the other guys on here. I'm guessing the reason you're not answering the OP's question directly is to encourage them to find their own answer. I'm not an instructor, yet, but if it is the case that most instructors don't know how to teach SA, I'd like to be able to learn from one that does. PM's okay with me.

Edited to add:

Can't keep this up, I don't like pretending. I tried to find out where ACJCentral teaches so I can avoid it, but no luck. I'm astonished that people can be so confrontational and rude in a completely unprovoked scenario. GtE and mj are both well respected in here (even if mj can be a bit brusque) and tend to try to give decent answers to questions. If there is a difference in interpretation or a little mistake made in an explanation, that's human. To try to tear someone apart for it is childish, and very rude. Both ACJCentral and pull what seem to be indulging in trollishness, and that's a shame since it doesn't help answer the OP's question.

To the OP, I'm not an instructor yet, but I have had cause to examine SA for certain commercial enterprises. In my admittedly limited experience, spare capacity is the foundation. Then you can ask the question about what's happening next, what's going on out of the window, what's the implication of this next event, how can I position / request / configure to best achieve my aims etc.
Good luck for you and your student.

[ACJcentral]

The OP asked, 'How Do You Teach SA'?

Not one of the above posts has really addressed that so far, in terms of practical teaching.

A starting point could be to find an instructor who knows what SA is, can define it and fully understands how and when to teach it.

Snotty? BBK you must be very over sensitive if you think the above is 'snotty'.

You said on your earlier post

ACJcentral I await your explanation

Funny how it wasnt snotty then but now has suddenly become snotty. Perhaps youve suffered some ego bruising too?

I like your direct approach and it's clear you know more than the other guys on here. I'm guessing the reason you're not answering the OP's question directly is to encourage them to find their own answer.

FWCJ-Yes thank you-you do seem to have excellent SA in deducing that, I just needed to deal with the forum bullies first of all!

Competent instructors should already know the answer and be able to debate it. You will notice the bullies are all very quick to criticise other inexperienced instructors who ask questions about EASA requirements but when the tables are turned on them in regard to essential knowledge they behave like 6 year olds. It makes me ashamed to be in aviation.

I am off for a few days, some of us actually do fly aircraft for a living!

[Armchairflyer]

Some literature on SA training

Some sources cited in the chapter on situation awareness in the book "Safety at the Sharp End" by Flin, O'Connor, and Crichton (Ashgate, 2008):
- Appendix 6 of CAP 737 has already been mentioned (http://www.caa.co.uk/docs/33/CAP737.PDF) .
- Banbury, S., Dudfield, H., Hormann, J., Soll, H. (2007) FASA: Development and validation of a novel measure to assess the effectiveness of commercial airline pilot situation awareness training. International Journal of Aviation Psychology, Vol. 17, pp. 131-152
- Endsley, M., Robertson, M. (2000) Training for situation awareness in individuals and teams. In M. Endsley, D. Garland (eds.) Situation Awareness. Analysis and Measurement. Mahwah, NJ: LEA,
Manuscript apparently available online via the link cited by MJ: www.satechnologies.com/Papers/pdf/SATrainingchapter.pdf .
- Jones, D., Endsley, M. (1996) Sources of situation awareness errors in aviation. Aviation, Space and Environmental Medicine, Vol. 67, pp. 507-512
- Prince, C. (2000) Guidelines for situation awareness training. Report to FAA.
Available online: http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/...a/saguides.doc .

By and large, according to the book by Flin et al., it seems that the golden nugget in teaching SA has not yet been found: "Training in situation awareness, for example as part of crew resource management courses [...], tends to relate mainly in demonstrating its importance in maintaining safe operations, to providing information on how the brain processes and stores information, explaining models of situation awareness and the factors influencing this. Tips may be provided on how to maintain higher attention in particular work situations or tasks. [...] There have been few robust studies conducted to test whether there are long-term differences in performance relating to situation awareness training" (p. 32). One such evaluation study (besides the journal article by Banbury et al., 2007) can apparently be found here: http://essai.nlr.nl/downloads/ESSAI_Training_Dayton.pdf .

[Rithalic]

I've followed this thread for a while and waited to see anything that might assist and help the OP's actual question. There has been some useful info and some concepts that might assist. There has of course been the usual forum based back and forth slanging as well.

I'd add that what I've found assist my own SA and what I use to develop my students is as follows.

Lets use the example of the visual circuit.

First of all a student must have a clear mental model of what they are trying to achieve. By this i mean if for example they are doing circuits they must understand how the circuit is flown and where and when to make certain calls.

To start with their capacity is most likely going to be totally absorbed by actually flying the circuit themselves and therefore I am there to keep watch and highlight other traffic and RT they have missed by focusing on flying purely. As they get better developed and start to fly more accurately and get the A/C stable earlier and understand the RT calls more definitely I can ease back and let them deal with more. Their SA increases the more they understand what is going on around them as a result of what they assume other traffic is going to do around them.

Its has been highlighted already that SA will improve with exp and this is very very true. My own SA improved dramatically as a result of becoming an IRI and having to pay specific attention to other IFR traffic. Thinking back to when I was a student and all I knew was the profile I was flying I gave little to no thought as to other IFR traffic. Now I have to manage my own single engine a/c relative to MEP and Jet a/c and have to negotiate my holding and approach time. There is no substitute to exp but TEM training allows us to highlight to the student what we might do in the case of.

My simple advice which follows other advice would be keep asking, what can you do now? What did you just hear on the radio? Where is that other traffic now? Where will he be shortly? What does that mean to us? Are we likely to be delayed at all? If so, is there anything we can do about it?

For example we're in the circuit and we've heard IFR traffic call established on final. So we can expect they'll be given priority over us. Well lets tell Tower that we can do a short approach or that we're downwind and expect to Orbit for separation. It's all about getting the best out of our situation/ managing ourselves relative to the traffic around us.


If your guy is struggling with SA I would suggest that the principle problem is not his SA. It is probably that he is focused too much on his own A/C. And this is probably because he is NOT TRIMMED and therefore spending his mental resources flying as opposed to monitoring the environment around him.

Firstly free up his resources by making sure he is flying accurately and trimmed. This will allow then a profile to be flown with minimum attention and then capacity can be directed towards the environment around him.

[mad_jock]

By and large, according to the book by Flin et al., it seems that the golden nugget in teaching SA has not yet been found:

That is pretty common with the NASA stuff as well.

There are references to the 4 pillars of SA. Terrain, wx, position, communications.

But to me this misses out time and systems.

But there is also an x factor which to be honest I think is linked to how many times you have scared yourself or had to deal with a situation that with hine sight was avoidable. The difference between "don't put your hand near the fire" and tears and screams when an ember gets them. The second situation is usually the end of the kid going near the fire.

Maybe the best way of teaching SA is giving the student enough rope to screw up but not enough to hang themselves. Its certainly something I do with FO's to the point of letting get into the position of requiring a go-around. In a couple of cases the go-around was their first real one outside doing one for training purposes. But I am lucky that we have empty sectors into 1 movement an hour regional airports where I can do this with out scaring the hell out of the punters.

And I would go with the not trimmed idea. 99% of issues with PPL students are due to lessons 3-9 not being taught properly and understood. A couple of hours revision of the basics away from the circuit maybe the cure.

[Pull what]

Notice how MJ leaves out the next line from that quote:

"Training in situational awareness for example as part of CREW RESOURCE MANAGEMENT COURSES"

Perhaps he forgot that he previously said that SA was not part of CRM courses. Selective memory loss or yet another example of erroneous opinion?