MAN: It's hard to put your finger on what situational awareness is
but the military have a basic formula.
What's happened, what's happening and what might happen.
It's about knowing your surroundings well.
There is a range of definitions.
GRAHAM EDKINS: Situational awareness is really the forerunner to making a decision.
PETER GASH: Understanding what's around you,
what are the factors that are having an influence on what you're doing today.
HOLLY BRYAN: You know where the pilots are at all times,
you know what the pilots are doing at all times
and you know what you have to do next
to make sure the pilots get to the ground safely.
DAN PHILLIPS: So, situational awareness is definitely,
probably the biggest skill set needed.
MELANIE TODD: Remaining aware of what can go wrong and asking the question
of "Am I still where I think I am?"
LOUISE KIRKWOOD: Understanding the array of information
that's going on in the environment at that time
and then understanding how that then impacts
on what they need to know right now.
NARRATOR: But pilots can prepare and develop their situational awareness,
so they have spare mental capacity to deal with the problem
when something comes from left field.
Situational awareness isn't something you just switch on.
It begins with developing sound mental toughness,
being physically fit,
pre-visualising and thinking of all the 'what ifs' in your preparation,
knowing your aircraft inside and out,
having a good scanning technique,
and making sure you always have spare ability to deal with the unknown.
It's the constant endeavour to become a professional aviator.
MATT HALL: We can develop our ability to improve situational awareness
through preparation and planning,
and that's probably the biggest point we need to concentrate on,
is how do we do this?
When I'm in my race environment,
we always look at what we want to happen,
what can happen and what we don't want to happen.
What that means is that when I'm in the race plane,
I've thought about it so much that no matter where I am in the track,
I'm very aware of the altitude I should be,
I'm very aware of where the next pylon should appear,
I'm very aware of what my next action is going to be,
so that if something else pops up,
I've got the capacity to identify it and then take action against it.
BEN COOK: Before you lose situational awareness,
you've lost your own ability to know that you're not performing
at a standard that you're normally capable of,
and so, what will typically happen
is that's when the tunnel vision's kicked in,
you're starting to miss cues that you're not delivering something
to the standard you know.
Your teammates around you perhaps are so buried
and so self-centred on their own role and then something goes wrong.
Whereas what I tend to find is people with good self awareness,
and I've seen this many times,
they tend to have those little cues that kick in at the back of the head
that say, "This just doesn't feel right."
And this is where, if you've got, you know,
a bit of experience and some ego and-or complacency kicking in,
it's the person with good self-awareness that says, "This doesn't feel right"
that will step back and then ask some critical questions of themselves
and will start opening up and asking the questions required of the team
to say, "What are we really doing and should we be doing it this way?"
"Is there a better way of doing this right now given the pressure we're under?"
- An example of me losing situational awareness
is when I was young fighter pilot.
We were airborne as a four-ship
and there was a competition going on with the four of us:
who could get the best score in air-to-ground gunnery, strafing.
Yes, I was physically healthy, I was mentally healthy,
but emotions started to come up and cloud my judgement.
I wanted to win.
The red mist came in.
On my last pass, I had a ranging issue with the aircraft
where the head-up display provided some incorrect range data,
which led me in close to the ground.
Now, if I wasn't so emotionally engaged
in trying to get the best score possible with the gun,
I would've been sitting back, taking in more information,
I would've had more SA and I would've realised,
I'm getting very low here, I'm past the road that's normally my recovery point,
but because I was so emotionally engaged, my bucket had filled up completely
with just making sure that the pipper is on the target
so I can beat the other guys that are in the pattern with me
that I failed to see everything else that was happening around me.
I pull the trigger and luckily for me, there was only one round left in the aircraft.
The one round went out and the gun stopped firing.
When the gun stopped firing, that was something I was not expecting,
and all of a sudden I popped out of my absolute focus
and realised I was about to hit the ground.
I did a maximum-G recovery in the Hornet
and I missed the ground by round about 15 to 20 feet.
The tail of my aircraft went between the poles holding the strafe rag.
If there'd been more than one round in that gun,
I'm quite certain that I would've killed myself and that all came from being...
You know, I was physically healthy, I was mentally healthy,
but my emotions became too high
to try and win against some other guys around me
and I lost SA because all of my focus got dragged into one point
and I missed all of the external cues
that were saying you're going to crash the aircraft.
TODD MICKLESON: After an incident or an accident,
it's easy to say the pilot lost situation awareness.
What does that really mean at the time?
How do we recognise we've lost situation awareness?
I could argue that you've got to have a level of situational awareness
to know that you've lost situational awareness.
So, it really becomes a little bit of a chicken or the egg sort of argument.
What does it really mean to us?
It means taking the information in the environment that's out there,
really processing that to build a picture of what's going on
and using that picture in the right way
and using our experience and our skills to achieve what it is that we want to achieve.
How do we put that into practice?
Well, obviously when we have instruments in front of us as pilots,
we need to learn how to monitor the instruments.
That's the first level of really perceiving what's going on in the environment.
So, our instruments are there for a reason,
they are there as a tool to build a picture of what's going on.
Although it's a bit of a numbers game,
we're not just sitting there looking at a whole bunch of numbers,
we're trying to build a picture of where the aeroplane is in space and time.
OK, that's situation awareness.
So, we take information, we process that
and come up with a picture of where the aeroplane is.
The next level, if you like, is then predicting
what's going to happen next,
and this is where skill and training really comes in, and experience, for pilots.
We're not just there to monitor instruments,
we're not just there to say where the aeroplane is now,
we have to be able to think ahead
and know where the aeroplane's going to be next,
what's going to happen next
and dealing with a bit of a choose-your-own-adventure
kind of game where if this happens, this is what we'll do.
If A happens, we'll do B.
If B happens, we'll do C.
That sort of thing.
So, that's planning ahead.
So, really, situational awareness
is about building a picture of what's going on,
knowing where we are in space and time,
predicting where we're going to be,
and making whatever changes we need to make to achieve that outcome.
- Situational awareness is really the forerunner to making a decision.
So, you know, if you're aware of your environment,
you know, what the weather's doing, what your aircraft is doing,
you're then in a better position to think ahead
about what you're going to do next,
and I really - that's the basics behind situational awareness.
It's not really an academic debate
or concept that we need to get so focused on.
It's about understanding that to anticipate what's coming next,
you know, you've really got to understand,
you know, your current environment, your own limitations
and make sure you take in enough information
to diagnose what your next problem is going to be and anticipate that.
- The concept of, you know, remaining aware of what can go wrong
and asking the question of "Am I still where I think I am?"
That side of situational awareness is very useful.
Absolutely.
But labelling it as a way to just to say,
"Oh, well, they clearly lost situational awareness"
or "the problem was they had poor situational awareness"
doesn't get anyone anywhere.
So, promoting the actual behaviours and the techniques around it,
so am I planning for arrival at the destination
to discover the weather's not what I thought it was going to be.
What's my backup?
At what point in my checking that?
Am I still good? Am I still good?
You know, planning ahead and seeing that future.
PILOT: So, we're carrying some extra fuel in case we need to hold outside.
We're also going to touch down in Mackay
and reassess the weather on our way there
and if we feel that we need to take some extra fuel
to allow us the possibility of returning to Mackay
should the weather really be bad in Rockhampton,
then we'll take on that extra fuel at Mackay.
- OK.
- We've Got a plan A, a B and a C at this stage.
A is we go straight in,
B is we go towards Rockhampton and need to hold
for anything up to 30 minutes,
and C is that we decide to take on extra fuel in Mackay
because we think there's a serious chance that we might need to turn round
and come all the way back to Mackay.
- OK. Good set of options.
- Situational awareness, um, to me,
is that combination of people understanding the array of information
that's going on in the environment at that time
and then understanding how that then impacts
on what they need to know right now.
So, we in Qantas work very much with identifying cues.
So, the cues could be potential threats or hazards,
or social cues and having them at least analyse that
or identify them as a starting point.
Because if people actually identify them as a start,
then they're able to do something about it
and therefore with situational awareness or even the use of the word vigilance,
then it requires a very high level of someone being able to remain vigilant,
especially when workload or time or other pressures come in play.
To me, it can come down, even down to the basics of monitoring support role
and looking at a pilot having the ability and the skills to be able to do that.
It may even come down to them looking at various cues that are happening
in the environment and some of that can be down into proceduralised processes
through to their overall scan patterns,
and I know one of the initiatives that we now have built into our initial training
is don't just take for granted that people's scan patterns
enable them to maintain situational awareness.
It's getting people to have a scan pattern,
understand what they're looking for and then being able
to not necessarily just do it by habitual rote
but actually take the time to identify what are the key elements
in that scan pattern they need to know
and then how to come back into that monitoring environment.
MATT FOX: When you first start flying in Sydney's airspace,
like, to try and maintain SA, you've got airspace, you've got all the traffic,
you've got, you know, the Bankstown control zone
plus Sydney really close. Richmond.
There's a lot of moving parts just to get out of here.
Plus, you've got weather, you know, all the different layers,
you know, many steps ahead of the aircraft, you know where you want to go
or you've looked at fuel, you've looked at weight and balance
and you're just feeling comfortable
and a long way ahead of the aircraft,
so when a mission comes in to a different location,
like, you're in a headspace
where, you know, it might be slightly different,
it might be a winch or something like that
but you're just a long way ahead of the aircraft. So, how you get that?
Probably just good preparation.
As soon as I come in to work, I sit down and I've got a process
that I just step through everyday until the morning brief,
so that first half an hour to an hour.
As soon as the bell goes off, then I'm ready to go.
ADRIAN PARK: I mean, many pilots will be familiar with the power curve
and I use that as a bit of a metaphor sometimes.
So, we know in the power curve or the drag curve
that in an engine or, you know, helicopter, fixed wing, it doesn't really matter,
if you've got a certain amount of power available
and then the aircraft has a certain amount of power required,
we all know that as long as you've got a margin between power available,
power required, the machine will keep flying.
So, I liken that often times to situational awareness
where there's a certain amount of safety power required
from a particular circumstance,
there's a certain amount you can give based on your alertness,
your experience and so forth, your training.
As long as there's a margin there, it's fine.
If there isn't a margin, that's when you lose situational awareness.
So, using a datum, coming to a stop as we can in helicopters.
You can't do that in fixed wing.
But even a fixed wing, you can go into an orbit
or you can give yourself a bit more time,
you're actually lessening the demand on, you know, your cognitive abilities
and giving yourself time to catch up.
So, always maintaining that margin and keeping that margin nice and thick
between what I call safety power available, safety power required
is really, really important.
TREVOR WRIGHT: Not only do you have to be aware of what's going on around you,
situationally aware, you have to be proactive
and that's how we deal with it,
and you never take anything on its laurels.
You're always we reassessing everything all the time.
Things that you do take for granted and think couldn't be a problem,
can be a problem given the right circumstances.
So, you have to be extremely vigilant.
And you have to bring that into all your pilots as well.
So, when they leave here, they've got that culture
of looking around them,
assessing the situation and working out how it can affect them.