ESSAI - Enhanced safety through situation awareness integration in training
Overview
Background & policy context:
It is currently widely believed that situation awareness and threat management skills are a significant factor in avoiding aircraft accidents and incidents and play a major role in a crew's ability to cope with hazardous situations.
As air transport operations have become more reliable, aircrews are less exposed to aircraft and system failures. However, the growth in the complexity of highly integrated systems has made the task of identifying developing problems much more difficult. How to train flight crew for these very low probability events is clearly a challenge for the aviation industry.
Objectives:
The goal of the project is to provide workable training tools and techniques for:
- Maintaining and recovering situation awareness; and
- performing threat management should an in-flight situation deteriorate and become potentially hazardous.
The requirements for the training programme were to:
- Base it on scientific and operational data likewise;
- allow for the integration with existing operator recurrent training practice;
- allow for the adoption not only by major air carriers, but also medium and small operators;
- allow for the later adaptation of training solutions for application in ab-initio and/or transition training at e.g. flight schools, aircraft manufacturers and regulators; and
- develop it in a generic way independent of e.g. type of aircraft and cockpit environment.
Methodology:
The project's training tool was developed in 5 phases comprising:
- A literature review and state of the art investigation of situational awareness and threat management concepts;
- an analysis of incidents and accidents related to situational awareness and threat management;
- the definition of training needs and the outline of the training programme based on a preliminary hot-list of skills to be considered for inclusion in training;
- design, development and tailoring of the training programme based on refined concepts such as the anticipation of future phases of flight in order to maintain situation awareness instead of simply noticing events, the recognition of clues indicating loss of situational awareness, the avoidance to threats rather than the mitigation of consequences, and the application of situation control e.g. through balancing the workload among crew members; and
- a validation exercise, employing an Airbus A330 flight simulator, aimed at assessing the effectiveness of the proposed training.
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