I’ll speak here as a flight instructor talking to fellow instructors, but hopefully I’ll be able to keep it relevant to students, pilots, and others as well.
The importance of focusing on situational awareness and nurturing it as a core competency has always been a passion for me and a foundation for my school, but it was while watching an episode of Air Disasters last night that I decided to talk abut it today.
A pilot is: alert, aware, adaptive, and analytical.
The episode examined three separate incidents in our aviation history that pivoted on failed communications and faulty situational awareness. As I watched I was reminded of just how important what I call “being a pilot” was to our collective safety. A pilot is: alert, aware, adaptive, and analytical. Teaching these skills and evaluating these attributes from day one is critical.
I believe the most important tool that the FAA recommends to us is SBT, scenario based training. The way we use this technique at AVIER is by utilizing a series of missions to nearby airports, each session adding another aspect of pilot training but importantly creating a framework for the job of being a pilot: power plant operations, taxiing, surface operations, communications, airspace, take off and landing, pitch-power-trim, checklist usage, situational awareness, pilot responsibility relative to other pilots and the FAR’s, entering airspace and the traffic pattern, and navigation.
Embedded in these tasks is the vital necessity of understanding and being comfortable with our place in the system. We teach our students to ask who is around us, where are we, and what words will perfectly describe our position and intentions?
One factor not to be glossed over involves grasp of the English language. So many students are not native speakers, which is difficult but success is critical to safety. I’ve had students over the years who have demonstrated to me that they are able to hold a normal conversation with apparent full comprehension but upon review they are backfilling their perceptions with clues gained moments later. This works well in casual interactions, but falls dangerously short of acceptable in cockpit or ATC communications where precision is important and acceptance of a clearance is an indication of the pilot’s intention to comply.
It is important to note here that a shortcoming in communication is not the sole domain of English-second-language speakers.
Any pilot who is task saturated or is put in a position to operate outside their experience or comfort level is susceptible to dangerous error.
Among the accidents from the episode of Air Disasters I mentioned earlier was that of United Express 5925 in Quincy, IL 1996. There were three airplanes involved, two private airplanes on the ground and one commuter airplane on approach to land. The United Express captain conveyed her position consistently and professionally, she even queried the King Air on the intersecting runway for departure of his intentions. I gathered from several accounts of the accident that the King Air pilot was acting as an instructor pilot with his student on the radios. It appears that this crew was distracted, perhaps by other tasks, because they never directly responded to the United captain. When the United pilot repeats her call for the intentions of the King Air pilot, another voice comes on the frequency. It is a new private pilot in a Piper Cherokee who announces that he is: “holding for take-off ON runway 4.” The King Air is now rolling for take off, the United captain believes that this plane is “holding,” completely unaware that there is a third plane in play. The airliner and the twin collide, killing 14 people.
There are plenty of links in this accident chain to be sure. The first was the failure of the King Air crew to exercise awareness of anything going on outside of their own cockpit. They made no effort to communicate their intentions relative to the landing aircraft. One possibility might be that their radio volume might not have been turned up, and they never heard the calls. Alternatively it is also possible to be so task saturated, or absorbed, as to be unaware of other aircraft on the frequency. In any event, they were also unaware of the inappropriately timed call from the third aircraft relative to the situation.
The next link in the chain was the inappropriately timed and inaccurately worded call from the private pilot. His call indicated that he was: “7646 Juliet holding for departure on runway 4.” If he had only indicated that he was a Cherokee he might have alerted the airliner that he was not the King Air. Also it would be more accurate for him to indicate that he was holding SHORT of runway 4, and not add a comment indicating “ON runway 4.” Better yet, his timing to speak up at all indicated a complete unawareness of the impending conflict between the other two aircraft.
The real crime here is that the professional pilot, operating into a field with no professional ATC services, tried so hard to interpret the less than professional communications of the other pilots and ended up cobbling together an awareness of the intentions of the aircraft on the surface. One way to break the chain would be to insist on proper calls from the departing aircraft, but where might that go? Also I guess (with no effort to armchair quarterback this one!) she could have decided that the situation was too murky to continue the approach. Of course, this would be all the more obvious if her calls for clarification of the intentions of the other pilot met with no response, but the third pilot, unaware of what else is going on, chimes in and makes it sound plausible that the King Air pilot is holding. Neither pilot on the ground demonstrated any awareness of the larger situation. Neither of them used proper phraseology.
This story is the inspiration for discussing the importance of teaching situational awareness, proper phraseology, and our place and responsibility in this web of activity.
When taught as a primary task, consistently from the beginning, it is exponentially more likely that a pilot will grow up to be a safe and contributing participant in aviation safety. I see it every day with my students, and I see new opportunities every day to do more.
