EASA Professional Pilot Studies

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“Never allow your ego, self-confidence, love of flying, pressure from a customer, boss or co-pilot, or economic need to interfere with your good judgement during any stage of a flight. There is no amount of pride, no thrill, pleasure, schedule or job that is worth your licence or your life and the lives of your passengers. Complacency kills, and so does being a cowboy.” John Bulmer

L e g al B i t This book contains information gathered from many sources. It is published for general reference and not as a substitute for independent verification by users when circumstances warrant. It is sold with the understanding that the author is not engaged in rendering any legal advice or explicit flight instruction. The publisher and author disclaim any personal liability, either directly or indirectly for advice or information presented within. Every effort has been made to supply complete and accurate information, the author and publisher assume no liability for its use, nor for any infringement of the intellectual property rights of third parties which would result from such use. This book is sold as is without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose. Neither the Author, the Publisher nor their dealers or distributors assume liability for any alleged or actual damages arising from its use. In other words: These notes are for private study, and contain interpretations of official documentation, which changes, so there could be technical inaccuracies through no fault of the author or publisher. As a result, alterations will be made without reference to anyone, and they are not guaranteed to suit your purposes. The author, publisher, and their distributors or dealers are not responsible for situations arising from their use.

Co py ri ghts , e tc. This book copyright © 2016 Phil Croucher ISBN 978-1-926833-22-4 Notice is hereby given that the name PHILIP ANDREW CROUCHER, in capital letters, or any variation thereof, is claimed by Phil Croucher, which name may not be used without permission. Graphics copyright © Steve Sparrow, Phil Croucher (with help from Corel Corporation). Special thanks to David Webb and Rick Carlisle. Some charts and extracts: reproduced with permission of Jeppesen Sanderson, Inc. NOT FOR NAVIGATIONAL USE © Jeppesen Sanderson, Inc. [2016].

A ll Ri gh ts Re se rve d Our staff of Witches, Weird Hags and Assorted Familiars are prepared to cause Visitations of a most Irritating and Embarrassing nature upon anyone foolish enough to copy parts of this work without the permission of the author. Seriously, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or used in any other form than originally supplied, without prior written permission from the author.

his book is based on the modular self-study program for the EASA ATPL(A) examinations provided by Caledonian Advanced Pilot Training in the UK.

Proper pilot performance is based on knowledge, planning, and anticipation of what the aircraft will do and you will not be able to achieve that without studying properly. Your real training starts in your first job, and what you learn before then can be very important. For example, most pilots gain licences from several countries over their careers - if you have a good core knowledge, you will be in and out of the exam rooms a lot quicker. In addition, if you do the minimum work for your exams, by learning the answers rather than the material , it will be painfully obvious to the interview panel when you finally go for a job

EASA Professional Pilot Studies

“Pure book knowledge should be impeccable - every second of doubt about "what do I do now?" is worth 30% of workload. Mostly because the self-doubt and secondguessing are real time and mental capacity wasters. The more you know flat cold, the easier it is to fly under the gauges” Nick Lappos

Author’s Note: A huge problem for writers of material such as this is that there are no references given with the learning objectives for the EASA exams, so nobody really knows what level to teach to! Many questions in Human Factors, for example, have come from pop psychology books rather than accepted sources, and others are just there to prove how clever the examiners are, rather than to ensure that you have the knowledge to fly properly. The only depth of knowledge indication (and source of references in case of challenges) is in the questions themselves which, naturally, nobody is allowed to see. The FAA and Transport Canada, on the other hand, issue publications from which all their questions are taken. As a result, in addition to this book, you will need access to a commercial question database. You are welcome to use our own one at www.rtfq.org (it’s free), but Aviation Exam (www.aviationexam.com) is also recommended. In addition, current aviation texts share a problem with many other topics, particularly computing, in that the subject matter is copied and changed subtly over the years, until eventually the original meaning is lost, and written exams end up being based on inaccurate data. Although, naturally, the required syllabus (and more!) has been followed, this material has come from original sources (as old as 1947!), having started off as a Canadian book (written by me) which is currently used as a reference by Transport Canada for exam questions (it is 0-1

also in the EASA library). The Canadian text owed its inspiration to good military training and Norman Royce’s Commercial Pilot Studies, plus what I remembered from Avigation’s training notes when I did my own UK licences. However, the radio and computer theory has also come from my operation of amateur radio and teaching of Information Technology, plus Operational Procedures from starting up companies and writing Ops Manuals, and some legal training.

Manufacturer’s data has also been included, plus some stuff from NASA, with special thanks to Tim Vasquez for his review of the Meteorology section, and Ray Portlock for his advice on electronics! Thus, there is much modern information that is relevant to being a pilot, but which may (as yet) be unknown to the examiners. Put another way, the material has not all been filtered through the usual aviation systems, and is more likely to be correct. As such, there may be some conflict with examination questions, or rather the answers - for example, one question refers to Halon being used in fire extinguishing systems, where Freon has been used for years. Known differences have been noted in the text.

EASA Professional Pilot Studies

DIFFERENCES For people coming to the EASA world from North America, some differences are immediately apparent. The maple leaf symbol is meant as a transition aid for Canadian pilots. First of all, although there are areas where you don't need to speak to anyone on the radio, they are few and far between, and at low level, as almost all airspace is controlled in some way or another (bush pilots take note!) The transition level is also very low, at 3,000 feet in most countries, so get used to those low flight levels. Next, another barometer setting can be typically used for takeoffs, landings and operations within the circuit, called QFE, which is simply one that gives you a reading of zero feet when on the ground at an aerodrome. It isn't used in North America because many aerodromes are at high elevations and the readings would be off the scale. The setting you are used to, the aerodrome setting against mean sea level, is called QNH. And what about those Q codes? They are a hangover from wireless telegraphy days, and are not officially supposed to be used, although everyone does (the idea was to use short codes instead of commonly used expressions to reduce transmission times). Flight duty times are shorter, too, and are not part of the exam. You should also join the circuit overhead and there is no UNICOM. 0-2

With regard to examinations, it may seem that you are learning a lot of stuff that will not be useful to you. That's certainly true to some extent, but the EASA system makes you learn everything you might need for your career before you start, rather than as you go along - in North America, you will likely be exposed to the same material over the years, but from company ground school and various other type rating courses. It’s just that the Europeans have no guarantee that this will happen and expect you to be a seasoned professional from the start the original intention behind the EASA exams was to make them the equivalent of a degree, since people were regarded as joining a profession. As with many other degrees, a lot of the subject matter was included as padding for credibility purposes, and the main purpose was forgotten. Currently, the EASA ATPL, according to Bristol University, has the same standing as two years of a degree-level course, although the exam procedures are nowhere near as rigorous as that.

E Q U I P M E NT R E Q U I R E D For the UK exams, you will also need: • Access to the Jeppesen Student Pilot Route Manual, used in Flight Planning and Navigation. This supplied at the exams • Flight computer. Must be: • Jeppesen CR-3 • Pooleys CRP-5 • AFE ARC 2 • Chart plotting gear, including a clear ruler marked in mm/cm and inches, 18 ins long at least, dividers, protractor/plotter.

However, some of the content is there for third party reasons - Human Factors training is an international requirement, and radio theory must be learnt because you have a cut-down version of the amateur radio licence, and you need to know how not to screw up the airwaves.

EASA Professional Pilot Studies

• Calculator. Must be: • Texas Instrument TI-30XS. • Sharp EL-W531. • Citizen SR-260. • Casio FX-83/85 series. • Casio FX-300. Tip: The hours, minutes, secs functions can save loads of time and avoid costly errors. The above can be obtained from:

• Transair (www.transair.co.uk). • Pooleys (www.pooleys.com) - mention CAPT for a discount! • Airplan Flight Equipment (www.afeonline.com). • The Flight & Model Store (www.flightstore.co.uk).

STUDYING It has been found that, within two days, if it isn't reviewed, people remember less than 70% of any subject matter they have studied. By the end of the month, the figure falls to 40%. On the other hand, if it's looked over again within 2 days, then 7, you should be above the 70% level until the 28th day. Another review then should make it remain long-term. In fact, short and frequent bursts of study are more effective than one long one - the brain appears to like short "rests" to assimilate knowledge. Constant reviewing is the key, especially for a short time at the end of each day. (Source: Ohio State University). In other words, reinforcement is necessary for long-term memorisation of any subject matter, an essential component of which is taking notes, especially when the subject matter is not familiar. In any case, the real work is done after the lectures, on your own, which is something that university students know all about. However, here are a few tips: • Allow plenty of time - this means that you need a good routine. • If you study during the day, review it in the evening. • Get plenty of rest - take some nights off! University students know all about beer, too! Then you need to practice and practice the exams…….

EASA Professional Pilot Studies

EXAMS & TECHNIQUE The clock starts ticking from the month in which you take the first exam, but you can take as long as you want to prepare for it. • Rule No 1: Know your subject!

• Rule No 2: Don't take the exams before you're ready - they will be there next time. The exam questions are multi-choice, with four selections for you to choose from for each question. Although you might use sample ones, or even have access to a database , don't just learn the answers, but read around them (the whole point of these notes), and use variations on them to keep your mind flexible - if you rely on feedback from other people, you need some luck to get the same questions they got - it might help with some subjects, but certainly not Nav Gen or Meteorology. If you know how to do things from the bottom up, or know why things happen, you don't need luck (or a good memory!) You will certainly be a better pilot (would you like to fly with someone who just memorised the answers?) In the exam room, go through the questions once, and answer those you absolutely and positively know the answer to (this will save a LOT of time!) Do the rest more carefully, looking for where the marks are, remembering that it's entirely possible to get the answer to one question in the text of another, or even some nearly identical, and EASA Professional Pilot Studies

you will pick them up in the overview. Some questions carry more marks, but will take longer to answer, especially if they involve calculation. If you get stuck, move on and come back later. Otherwise, there's plenty of time, certainly enough to read each question twice, which sometimes you have to do because the wording is often strange, especially with EASA, where the native language of some examiners is not English (and is often why you get the question wrong). For example, correct numbers may be given in the choices available, but with the wrong units, so read the questions carefully! Most questions have answers that are correct if you make a mistake. Some are worded negatively, such as “What will not cause hypoxia?” Also be careful of double-thinking - sometimes the absolute right answer is not available or is not what the examiner wants! In other words, you might not be offered the ideal answer that you already have in your head, but have to choose the best one from a poor selection. Go figure. Although there's a time limit, nobody cares how quickly you pass, as long as you do, so don't rush, either. Give an answer to every question, even if none of them seem right, so if it turns out to be a bad one, you may get credit for it (if you don't answer it at all, you won't).

Order Of St udy The subjects in this book are arranged in their various chapters as our best attempt at structuring the syllabus without losing sight of the subjects that must be covered, whilst keeping at least a tenuous link between them. Part of the reason is to avoid unnecessary duplication, because some subjects share syllabus items. For example, Gen Nav and Instruments share compasses. Human Performance & Limitations is first because it contains important safety implications that should be taken on board before you start flying or studying (aside from being the one subject that most people at least have some familiarity with). Communications has questions on radio propagation, which is why it comes after Radio Navigation, where it is covered already. Navigation and Flight Performance/Planning are last because they draw on all the other subjects for their content (Performance covers POF as well, and Operational procedures includes some Performance), so you can expect to meet questions on just about anything. By then you should have had plenty of practice at exam technique, since they both require you to be quite slick.

RECOMMENDED READING The following books and publications (some of which have been used as reference material) are recommended reading for pilots wishing to round out their knowledge: • Aircraft Instruments & Integrated Systems by E H J Pallett. • Aerodynamics For Naval Aviators (US Govt). • Weather Forecasting by Tim Vasquez. • Meteorology for Glider Pilots by C E Wallington (out of print). • Commercial Pilot Studies by Norman Royce (out of print). • Handbook Of Aviation Meteorology, HMSO. • Air Command Weather Manual, Canadian Government. • Selkirk College Training Materials, Selkirk College BC Canada. • Manual Of Aviation Meteorology (Australian Government). • AP 3456 (Royal Air Force).

EASA Professional Pilot Studies

H UMAN P ERFORMANCE

ircraft are getting more reliable so, 040 01 01 in theory at least, accidents should happen less often. Unfortunately, this is not necessarily the case, so we need to look somewhere else for the causes. Believe it or not, accidents are very carefully planned - it's just that the results are very different from those expected, based on the idea that the folks who had them were doing things that made complete sense to them at the time (Dekker, 2006). The reason for studying Human Factors is to help you “generate countermeasures against anything that may affect your decision-making capabilities”, and to “seek a safe interface between human and system components”, with “due allowance for human performance”, as defined in the Standards And Recommended Practices issued by the International Civil Aviation Organisation, or ICAO, (which more or less governs aviation worldwide) as “Human capabilities and limitations which have an impact on the safety and efficiency of aeronautical operations”. The essential problem is that our bodies and minds are not designed for flight! In the air, physical and psychological stresses occur on top of the normal stuff of everyday life that should be taken note of in order to do our jobs EASA Professional Pilot Studies

properly. Minor illnesses, stress, fatigue, alcohol and caffeine can all affect your performance, and there are even regulations to cover their use, all discussed later in this section (you also have a duty of care to people in and around your aircraft). Amendment 159 of Annex 1 to the Chicago Convention (see Air Law) makes the study of Human Factors a mandatory part of obtaining a professional pilot’s licence. Such training is all about the safety and efficiency of the operation and well-being of the individual. The competent pilot must be motivated, a team player, a good communicator, and be able to manage crews and stress. As humans are part of the system, they must be medically fit and be certified as such by a physician at regular intervals. Your professional licence is not valid without a Class 1 medical certificate, which is valid for 12 months if you are under 40 and 6 months if you are over, except when multi-crew, when it goes back up to 12 months. You may not act as flight crew if you know or suspect that your physical or mental condition renders you unfit to do so. In other words, you may not exercise licence privileges once you are aware of a decrease in your medical fitness that makes you unable to exercise them safely. Medicals are only valid if you meet the initial issuing requirements. A Board of Inquiry or insurance company may interpret the words "medically fit" a little differently than you think if you fly with a cold 1-1

or under the influence of alcohol or drugs. In any case, you should talk to a medical examiner as soon as possible in the case of: • admission to a hospital or clinic for over 12 hours • surgery or other invasive procedures • regular use of medication

• regular use of correcting lenses In addition, you should inform the authorities in writing of significant personal injuries involving your capacity to act as a member of a flight crew, or illness that lasts for more than 21 days (as soon as that period has elapsed), or pregnancy. In these cases, your medical is suspended, but it can be reinstated after an examination, or if you are exempt. It can be given back directly after pregnancy.

between the time any person boards it with the intention of flight, and all persons have disembarked. This does not include injuries from natural causes, which are selfinflicted or inflicted by other people, or any to stowaways hiding in places not normally accessible to passengers and crew. Significant or Substantial Damage in this context is damage or failure affecting structure or performance, normally needing major repairs - essentially, anything that may involve an insurance claim. Under ICAO, a fatal injury involves death within 30 days. A serious injury involves: • more than 48 hours in hospital within 7 days • more than simple fractures of fingers, toes and nose • lacerations causing nerve or muscle damage or severe haemorrhage • injury to any internal organ

ACCIDENTS A reportable accident occurs when:

• 2nd or 3rd degree burns or any over 5% of the body 040 01 02

• anyone is killed or seriously injured from contact with an aircraft (or any bits falling off), including jet blast or rotor downwash. • an aircraft sustains damage or structural failure. • an aircraft is missing or inaccessible. EASA Professional Pilot Studies

• exposure to infectious substances or radiation An incident is any happening, other than an accident, which hazards or, if not corrected, would hazard any aircraft, its occupants or anyone else, not resulting in substantial damage to the aircraft or third parties, crew or passengers. In other words, a dangerous event, but not as serious as an accident.

An accident is the end product of a chain of events so, in theory, if you can recognise the sequence it should be possible to stop one before it happens. A common saying is that "the well oiled nut behind the wheel is the most dangerous part of any car". Not necessarily true for aviation, perhaps but, in looking for causes other than the hardware when it comes to accidents, it's hard not to focus on the pilot (or other people - e.g. the human factor) as the weak link in the chain - around 75% (between 70-80%) of accidents can be attributed to this, although it's also true to say that the situations some aircraft (and people) are put into make them liable to misfortune, particularly with helicopters - if you continually land on slippery logs, something untoward is bound to happen sometime! Even experienced pilots can get caught out. Take, for example, one who is tasked to do two flights in an afternoon, the first one with a light load of two people and the second with four. It would seem logical to fill the machine up with enough fuel to cover both flights, since the loads allow it and the schedule is tight between them, so you can save time by not refuelling. But what if the first passengers are late, or don't even turn up? You are then faced with doing the second trip with more fuel than you would normally plan for to allow for safety margins, even though you might be within the weight limits. Of course, you could defuel, but that can be a major inconvenience when you are the only one there and the passengers are waiting in the usual car-park-as-aEASA Professional Pilot Studies

passenger-lounge! Thus, it is not necessarily a person's character, but their circumstances that can be at the root of an accident, as has been proven by many psychological studies involving prison guards. The "safety record" of an airline can also be nothing but a numbers game. Take a flight from Los Angeles to New York with two hundred passengers on board - the distance is 3000 miles, so they have flown 600,000 passenger-seat miles. With 150 on the flight back, you get 1,050,000, for being in the air for only 9 hours! If they have 20 aircraft doing that five days a week, and injure one passenger, they can say it happened only once in 105,000,000 passenger-seat-miles, which is still only 900 hours! Having said that, when flying, you are still safer by over 9:1 against driving or 300:1 over riding a bicycle on the road. Currently, the accident rate is around 1 per million aircraft movements. However, it is impossible to design all errors out, so no system is safe all on its own - it still depends on people for its operation, and safety is not the only goal they have to achieve (Transport Canada's statement that a safety management system is a "businesslike approach to safety" does not mean that company profits, etc. should be taken into account, but that safety procedures should be integrated into the company's normal business practice). Granted, some people in any system may have an "attitude" problem, as discussed later, but it is definitely 1-3

The Human Factor

not the only factor. Thus, there is hardly ever a single cause responsible. And if you are thinking that safety procedures might be expensive or inconvenient, review the consequences of an accident: • Fatalities and/or injuries. • Customer relations & company reputation suffer. • You need another aircraft . • . while still paying for the one you crashed. • Any schedule gets screwed up.

• The insurance is increased. • You get unwanted attention from the media and the authorities - the strongest economic pressure to improve safety is often avoiding negative publicity. Even if you don’t get that far, it’s safe to say that, for every accident, there are thousands of incidents - it costs $15,000 for an airliner to return to the gate, or $500,000 to shut down an engine in flight in terms of lost revenue and other indirect costs, such as hotels for passengers. It even costs $100 or so just to start a turbine engine, so it shouldn’t be done lightly! Such losses are uninsured and cost the airline industry over $36 billion in 2001.

EASA Professional Pilot Studies

THE HU MA N F A C T O R There are two broad aspects to Human Factors: • Engineering, which includes: • Ergonomics, or human capabilities and limitations in the design of machines and objects, work processes and environments. In World War II, many problems (like bombs missing targets) were caused by mismatches between machines and operators. • Anthropometry, the study of human body measurements. • Cognitive Psychology. The study of human behaviour and the mental processes that drive it. That is, how mental processes interact with each other to help us understand and use objects. The emphasis on the human element in relation to accidents was first recognised in '79 and '80, where over 500 incidents relating to shipping were analysed, and 55% were found to be related to human factors. Did you think that was 1979 & 80? It was actually in 1879 and 80! In fact, as well as the iceberg, the Titanic had to dodge the Deutschland, which was floating around the shipping lanes, having run out of coal (it also nearly collided with the New York on its way out of Southampton). Since then, through the 1980s and 90s, aviation accidents in the USA 1-4

The Human Factor

were analysed in depth, and it was found that crew interaction was a major factor in them since, nearly 75% of the time, it was the first time they had flown together, and nearly half were on the first leg, in situations where there was pressure from the schedule (over 50%) and late on in the duty cycle, so fatigue was significant (doesn’t everything happen late on Friday afternoon?)

The Captain was also flying 80% of the time. The problem is, that it's not much different now - 70% of aircraft accidents in the USA in 2000 were pilot-related, based on mistakes that could easily be avoided with a little forethought, and it was more or less the same figure way back in 1940. Now, the figure worldwide is around 80%. The majority of accidents studied by the Flight Safety Foundation occurred while a plane was taxying, or during the takeoff and initial climb, or during the approach and landing at the other end: “Half of all worldwide commercial jet accidents between 1959 and 1994 with known causes occurred during final approach and landing, a phase representing only 4% of total flight time. Of the 439 final-approach-and-landing accidents with known causes, 383 (78.1%) included flight crews as a primary causal factor. This percentage was far in excess of any other primary causal factor.” Thus, the accident rate is highest during takeoff and landing, but it is also high in the cruise, usually because EASA Professional Pilot Studies

the machine hits something in the way - one major cause of accidents is Controlled Flight Into Terrain, or CFIT, where a serviceable aircraft under the positive control of the crew interacts with something solid. Despite that, however, the phase of flight most prone to accidents (and subject to human error) is intermediate and final approach. In other words, 60% of accidents occur during the 4% of time spent nearer the ground. For helicopters, most fatal accidents happen in IMC, or at least they did between 1991-2000 in the USA, according to the Flight Safety Foundation. A study of 147 accidents found that 58% occurred in IMC, and human error was the primary cause in 68%. Otherwise, contributory factors may include: • Pilots disregarding the rules • Omitting important actions at critical stages • Lack of situational awareness • Press-on-itis Others could be poor planning and/or flying and decision making practices, or inadequate evaluation of the weather. Up to 8% of accidents are also due to maintenance errors. If air traffic continues to grow at the present rate, we will be losing 1 airliner per week and even more GA aircraft the Australian authorities are looking at 1 helicopter per week, which is why Human Factors training is now an 1-5

The Human Factor

ICAO requirement, with the syllabus drawn from many sources, including Psychology, Engineering, Physiology, Medicine, Sociology, Biology and others.

One problem is that the sort of mistakes that cause accidents arise from within individual pilots - if you want to be technical, they arise from intrapersonal (inside oneself) rather than interpersonal (between people) causes. A good example of an intrapersonal cause is an internal conflict, such as the one faced by a First Officer who must challenge the Captain. Modern life is stressful enough - we are all hostages to other peoples’ expectations and attitudes, and it often seems that, within an hour of waking up, we have a mix of attitudes all of our own, by the time the toast has been dropped (face down) and everyone’s had their bite out of you. However, what happens outside should not be brought into the cockpit - one function that checklists perform is to help keep your mind on the job and exclude outside influences. Using a checklist before starting is a contribution to safety because the concentration required reduces distraction from personal stress. It has also (finally) been realised that traditional methods of flight instruction have been missing something - the assumption has always been that, just because you have a licence, you know what you are doing, or that good, technically qualified pilots (or doctors, for example) make good decisions as a matter of course (I know many stupid EASA Professional Pilot Studies

doctors!) Naturally, everybody on the shop floor has always known that this is not necessarily so, and a lot of experienced pilots make mistakes, so experience is not the answer, either. In fact, experience can be a harsh teacher*, assuming you heed its lessons anyway, so ways have had to be found to use training instead, hence the ICAO requirements for Human Performance training. This means that manipulating the flying controls is less than half of the training required to be a competent pilot. *Good judgment is based on experience, which is based on bad judgment. Currently, aeronautical decision making is seen as a function that comes under standard psychological theory and practice (Brecke, 1982; Stokes and Kite, 1994). In fact, research into the human factors related to aircraft accidents and incidents has highlighted decision making as a crucial element (Jensen, 1982; O'Hare, Wiggins, Batt, and Morrison, 1994). The irony is that people who are aware that such training is a Good Thing do not need the courses - the sort that should most benefit are like the Enstrom owner who mentioned to his shocked engineer that he didn’t like the look of two bolts in the tail rotor assembly, so he turned them round and shortened one of them, since it was longer than the other. After patiently explaining during wall-to-wall counselling that the reason why one bolt was longer was for balance purposes, and

The Human Factor

that they were inserted one way round for a reason, the engineer suggested he take his custom elsewhere.

As with most other things, aviation is more of a mental process than a physical one. For example, it takes much longer to become a captain than it does to become a pilot, and CRM/PDM/Human Factors training aims to shorten the gap by substituting training for experience (the terms CRM, PDM, ADM and Human Factors are used interchangeably in this book). It is intended to develop the effectiveness of crew performance by improving attitudes towards flight safety and human relationship management. Almost the first thing you have to take on board is that not everyone does things the same way as you do, as a result of which, compromises have to be made in order to get the job done. Another is that, when operating by yourself, feedback is missing, which is useful for making decisions. The only real replacement for this is reviewing your flights and discussing them with colleagues, which is more difficult for helicopter pilots, because of the lack of meeting places (but licensed premises are good).

Single Pi lot Oper at ions Single pilot operations demand much higher standards, because they typically take place in unstabilised machines with the least accurate instruments in the worst weather. EASA Professional Pilot Studies

Aside from training, proficiency and recent experience, to help you achieve the higher standards of competency and discipline that single pilot operations demand, these suggestions have been collected from around the world: • Maintain a positive attitude. • Maintain medical fitness. • Be less willing to accept unserviceabilities. • Spend more time on planning & preparation, so you have a yardstick by which your flight can be compared afterwards - be prepared for eventualities before they happen! • Maintain situational awareness. • Resist urges towards risky behaviour. • Be prepared to question everything you do, as a second crew member might. • Maintain a stricter observance of legal requirements - resist commercial pressure. • Be more willing to ask for help, especially with clearances or directions to a reporting point. • Make more use of checklists and SOPs. If you have to design them as well, make them easier to read.

• Workload Management, especially at critical moments. Make sure you have the right equipment in the first place, you know its capabilities, and that you use it properly: • Manage time - use relatively slack periods to prepare for busy ones during the arrival.

• Manage the cockpit - get the maps in the right order! Make sure they are folded properly! Don’t throw the departure plates away too soon, in case you have to return to the departure point after takeoff. • Use the autopilot in busy airspace, with a monitoring role rather than a controlling one. However, do not use it until established in flight and certainly not below 400 feet. • Make more effective use of the GPS. Instead of pushing more buttons in flight, collect all the waypoints into a route so that the screen changes automatically as you pass them • Tune and use normal navaids as well as GPS. • Before you operate a switch or press a button, make sure it is the right one. • Cross check the instrument readings for logic!

EV OLUTION Since the problem of crew co-operation needed to be addressed, management principles used in other industries, such as Quality Assurance and Risk Management, were distilled into what is mostly called Crew Resource Management, prompted, in Canada, at least, by three accidents, one of which was at Dryden, which was also instrumental in new Canadian icing laws being passed. On the day concerned, the weather was forecast for generally unsettled and deteriorating conditions, with lowering cloud and freezing precipitation. The Fokker F28 landed late in the day, and behind schedule, which so far sounds like a typical day in aviation, especially with the crew having been 6 days away from home. Because the Auxiliary Power Unit wasn’t working, they had to keep one engine running, as there was no external start facility at Dryden. After refuelling, and when the passengers had been loaded, another 10 turned up, which meant that fuel had to be taken off. Since the engine had to be kept running for another 35 minutes, once all that was over, they needed more fuel, so there was another short delay to take more on. No de-icing was available, because one engine had to be kept running.

• Be critical of your performance so you can improve the next flight. EASA Professional Pilot Studies

For up to 2 months beforehand, and especially within the previous five days, the aircraft had been subject to multiple unserviceabilities, including smoke in the cabin and oily smells. It could have been grounded, but there was pressure to keep to the schedule and getting another would have meant delays. Maintenance deferred the repair of the fire detection system and a red placard, reading APU unserviceable, was placed on the APU panel.

Dryden Crash - Photographer Unknown

The flight crew had also recently converted from Convairs, which are very forgiving when it comes to taking ice, so perhaps they thought they could use that experience on the super-critical wing of the F-28. By now it was snowing heavily, and the F-28 had to wait at the holding point while a Cessna in distress landed. The takeoff roll was eventually begun 70 minutes behind schedule. After a slower than normal acceleration, the aircraft rotated and took off briefly, to settle back down on the runway. After a second attempt, it managed to get off the ground, passing the end of runway at only 15 ft. The whole exercise ended in a fireball of orange flames. Thus, although he bears the final responsibility, the Captain sure didn’t get much help from elsewhere (it didn’t help that there was no ATC either - clearances at Dryden are given from Winnipeg, which is a four-hour drive away, aside from the fact that the airport authority was trying to cut down on the firefighting equipment, so there was chaos at the incident itself). EASA Professional Pilot Studies

As it happens, most weather-based accidents in small aircraft involve inadvertent entry into cloud by people with only the basic instrument training required for the commercial licence. Next in line is icing. With regard to jet transports and executive jets, it’s CFIT (Controlled Flight Into Terrain), and the figures are 50% and 72%, respectively. Although it was introduced too early, and is prone to false alarms, GPWS marked a substantial decrease in hull loss rates in the 80s, after a TWA 727 hit a mountain near Washington DC in 1974, killing 92 people only two months after another plane nearly hit the same one. From 33 such accidents in 1964, the figure fell to just 8 in 1984, although this is still too high. Around 40% of fatal accidents were in aircraft without GPWS. 1-9

CRM was actually developed from the insights gained from installing Flight Data and Cockpit Voice Recorders, when crews were not considered to be assertive enough, and Captains not receptive enough. CRM back then could probably best be summed up in the phrase “I’m the Captain - you’re not!”, which leads to situations where, although it’s part of the First Officer’s job to monitor and challenge the Captain, a failure to do so could be down to the Captain’s management methods, because that’s where the rest of the crew take their lead from. Prompted by a NASA workshop in 1979, United Airlines started to include the training, and not just for pilots. The goal was synergism, meaning that the total performance of a crew should be greater than the sum of its parts, or each crew member (like Simon & Garfunkel, or Lennon & McCartney, who are talented enough by themselves, but so much better as a group). For instance, when you combine two radio frequencies, you get one more above and below. If you combine two singers, there is a third voice in there somewhere. It’s all a matter of vibration, and it’s the same with people, or flight crews. There is an extra buzz when a team is working well together, or when 2 + 2 = 5. As an example, until the mid 1960s, the French night mail crews routinely made landings at night in dense fog using standard instruments. Their regularity of service was 98%. A British journalist (Flight International) wrote in 1964 EASA Professional Pilot Studies

that one night they got down to 70 feet and saw only one light. At 100 feet they had seen nothing, but crew sympathy was such that no word was necessary to agree on a change of plan and go down further. The crew knew what the Captain had in mind. To achieve such synergy, members of any team must feel that they and their opinions are valued, and understand their roles. Since, in most companies, the teams change from day to day (or flight to flight), the whole organisation must therefore foster teamwork, from the top down, and attempt to reduce the effects of jagged edges between people (in other words, the relatively simple concept of learning to live with others and allowing for their differences, which involves sharing power on the flight deck, at the very least, as multi-crew means what it says - the real point is that everyone should know what’s going on). The behaviour of people in a company is very much a reflection of the management, in our case the commander, so there is an obligation to foster a positive working environment which, essentially, means not being surly or miserable - the cockpit culture should allow anyone on board to speak up if they feel they have to. Referring back to the Dryden accident, the significant amounts of snow on the wings were noticed by a flight attendant and two captains who were travelling as passengers, but who did not communicate the problem to the pilots. The flight attendant later said that she was 1-10

concerned by the snow, but because she had been put off by company pilots in similar situations in the past, she decided not to go to the cockpit. Although the immediate cause of the Dryden accident was accumulation of snow and ice on the wings during a delay in obtaining takeoff clearance, it was determined that the event was triggered by no less than 17 inadequate corporate processes. A reading of the accident report on the Air Florida flight that hit a bridge and ended up in the Potomac would also be instructive - the FO was clearly sure that something was wrong (icing) but didn't like to say so. Like it or not, you are part of a team, even if you are the only one in the cockpit, and you have to fit into an established system, especially when IFR. The CRM concept evolved from the original Cockpit Resource Management, through Crew Resource Management, where Decision Making became more important, into a third generation, which involved cabin crews, etc., and introduced aviation-specific training, as a lot of what served previously was very much psychologybased, but it is very difficult to escape psychology in just about every walk of life these days, and now aviation is no exception - all airlines use selection tests, as do many corporate employers. In fact, 90% of aviation casualties in World War I were down to human factors (50% during training), and in World War II they started testing to weed out people who had questionable decision-making skills, so it’s not really new. EASA Professional Pilot Studies

CRM then became integrated into all flight training, and an element is now met on nearly all check rides, with a complete syllabus cycle taking place over three years. In the US, the fourth generation can take the form of an Advanced Qualification Program (AQP) tailored specifically to individual company needs. Now we are in the sixth generation, which concentrates more on cockpit behaviour, and which is called Threat & Error Management, discussed later. A further development could be to change the name (yet again) to Company Resource Management, where other departments get involved in the same training. The benefit of this for Air Aurigny (in the Channel Islands) has been improved communication between departments and a sharpening up of the whole operation once people saw what everybody else had to cope with - turnaround times became shorter, which made a direct contribution to the bottom line. However, as mentioned above, the general principles of CRM have been around for some time - Field-Marshal Montgomery wrote that the best way to gain a cohesive fighting force was efficient management of its components, and he certainly succeeded in getting the Army, Navy and Air Force to work together. However, as far as definitions go, you could call it Cockpit Resource Management when you’re single pilot, and Crew Resource Management when you’re not.

Previously, you might have been introduced to the concept of Airmanship, which involved many things, such as looking out for fellow pilots, doing a professional job, not flying directly over aircraft, always doing pre-flight inspections, doing a clearing turn before taking off, etc. In other words, actions relating to being the "gentleman aviator", or exhibiting professional behaviour as an airman, which involves discipline, skill, knowledge (of yourself and the aircraft), risk management, etc. These days, especially when multi-crew, there are new concepts to consider, such as delegation, communication, monitoring and prioritisation, although they will have varying degrees of importance in a single-pilot environment. In fact, the term "pilot error" is probably only accurate about a third of the time as all it really does is indicate where a breakdown occurred. There may have been just too much input for one person to cope with, which is not necessarily error, because no identifiable mistakes were made. Perhaps we need a new phrase that occupies the same position that "not proven" does in the Scottish Legal System (somewhere between Guilty and Not Guilty). Airmanship is still a valid concept, and should be treated with as much respect as the regulations!

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Anyhow, the aim of this sort of training is to increase flight safety by showing you how to make the best use of any resources available to you, which include your own body, psychology, information, equipment and other people (including passengers and ATC), in flight or on the ground, even engine handling or using the humble map copilots are trained for emergencies, for example, so they can be used instead of automatically taking over yourself when something happens - like a human autopilot, in fact. Using a GPS for navigation, and ignoring the other navigation aids or the map, is bad CRM. You should be able to make better decisions after being introduced to the concepts, principles and practices of CRM, or Decision Making, with the intention of reducing the accident rate even further. That is to say, we know all about the hardware, now it's time to take a look at ourselves. Aircraft have limitations, and so do you! An accident-prone person, officially, is somebody to whom things happen at a higher rate than could be statistically expected by chance alone. Taking calculated risks is completely different from taking chances. Know your capabilities, and your limits. A skilled pilot who takes risks is a bigger problem than an average one who is prudent and cautious. 1-12

Things that can help, particularly with single-pilot operations, are: • Knowledge - know the flight manual

• Preparation - do as much as you can before the flight - is that runway really large enough to stop in if one engine fails? Has all the servicing been done? Is the paperwork correct? Visualise the route from the map - and fold it as best you can for the route. Got enough batteries for the GPS? Do you know the Minimum Safe Altitude if you get caught in cloud? And who to call? It has been noticed that pilots who receive decisionmaking training outperform others in flight tests and make 10-15% fewer bad decisions, and the results improve with the comprehensiveness of the training. Remember that your training cannot cover everything - instead, as with licences everywhere, you are given enough training to be able to make decisions for yourself, hence the importance of decision making training. CRM courses are supposed to be discussion-based, which means that you are expected to participate, with the intention that your experiences will be spread around to other crews. This is because it's quite possible never to see people from one year to the next in a lot of organisations, particularly large ones, and helicopter pilots in particular have no flying clubs, so experience is not being passed on. In fact, if you operate in the bush, you might see some of

your colleagues during training at the start of the season, and not see them till the end, if at all. Even when singlepilot, you still have to talk to management and engineers, and to people even more important - the customers! In short, CRM/PDM is the effective utilisation of all available resources (such as crew members, aircraft systems and supporting facilities) to achieve safe and efficient operation, by enhancing your communication and management skills. In other words, the emphasis is placed on the non-technical aspects of flight crew performance (the so-called softer skills) which are not part of the flying course but which are also needed to do your job properly - those associated with teamwork, and smoothing the interfaces between members of a team, loosely based on the four NOTECHS (non-technical skills) categories of: • Co-operation • Leadership • Situational Awareness • Decision Making EU regulations (Part Ops ORO.FC.115) state the requirements. CRM training encountered on check rides, etc. will be given by TRIs/TREs, who will have base privileges attached to their licences, but the kind of stuff that is done in a classroom must be done by a fully accredited person. 1-13

As we said before, you could loosely call this airmanship, with an element of common sense, but a newer term is Captaincy, as flying is a lot more complex now than when the original term was more appropriate. Both are transforming into Threat & Error Management, which is discussed later. The elusive quality of Captaincy is probably best illustrated with an example, using the subject of the Point Of Equal Time. If you refer to Flight Planning, you will find that it is a position where it takes as much time to go to your destination as it does to return to where you came from, so you can deal with emergencies in the quickest time. In a typical pilot's exam, you will be given the departure and destination points, the wind velocity and other relevant information and be asked to calculate the PET along with the PNR (Point of No Return), which is OK as far as it goes, but tells you nothing about your qualities as a Captain, however much it may demonstrate your technical abilities as a pilot. Now take the same question, but introduce a flight across the Atlantic, during which you are told that a passenger has appendicitis. First of all, you have to know that you need the PET. Then you find out that you are only 5 minutes away - technically, you should turn back, but is that really such a good decision? (Actually, it might not be, since it will take a few minutes to turn the old girl EASA Professional Pilot Studies

around anyway). Commercially, turning back could be disastrous, and here you find the difference between being a pilot and a Captain, or the men and the boys, and why CRM training is becoming so important. This is the style of questioning that is being introduced into EASA examinations. The working out of the PET is regarded as basic knowledge and assumed. A Captain is supposed to exhibit qualities of loyalty to those above and below, courage, initiative and integrity, which are all part of the right personality - people have to trust you, so character is an important part of being a pilot. This, unfortunately, means being patient and cheerful in the most trying of circumstances, and even changing your own personality to provide harmony within the crew, since it's the objective of the whole crew (as a team) to get the passengers to their destination safely. As single crew, of course, there is only you in your cockpit, but you still have to talk to others, and we all work in the Air Transport Industry - it just happens that your company is paying your wages at the moment. In this context, the word "crew" includes anybody else who can help you deliver the end product, which is:

. . Safe Arrival! 1-14

Safet y Management Syst ems A safe arrival is only as good as the system behind it - this would include the pilot who doesn't abuse the machine, the engineers who take pride in their work, the support staff in the operations office who don't overload the pilot with work they should be doing, and a management culture that allows people to approach their jobs in a manner that fosters safety and professionalism over short term customer satisfaction, and who are proactive (trying to stop the next accident) rather than reactive (wiping up the mess after the last one). To do this, various layers of paperwork have been developed over the years, culminating in the Safety Management Systems that each company is required to have. Although certain systems should be in place anyway, such as operations manuals or compliance systems (see Operational Procedures), they don't go far enough. The ops manual, for one thing, is a one-way document, and readers are simply expected to comply with its requirements. A compliance system goes a step further by having someone monitor the system and produce a slight amount of feedback to management (and occasionally from staff), but this has limitations before it starts, because the system on which it is based was originally for manufacturing, which does not lend itself well to a service industry such as aviation. It is a generic management system standard which doesn't have much to do with the end product, EASA Professional Pilot Studies

except for ensuring its production under sound management procedures, "leading to efficiency and consistency, and, ultimately, cost reductions". However, to allocate resources to improve safety, management needs timely information. For this, you need a system that starts at the bottom, allows information to flow both ways, and is non-punitive (a just culture). The goal of an SMS is “to develop the tools and skills that allow organisations to manage and mitigate risk to a level beyond the capability of normal regulatory oversight.” This involves a significant change in approach from management, and the skill and knowledge of the auditor. In short, as with the compliance system, the Authority keeps an eye on your company by assessing the effectiveness of the Safety Management System. In theory, if this is well managed and proactive, their involvement can be reduced without compromising safety.

So Is It Wor king? A study that examined 558 airline mishaps between 19832002 was conducted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in the United States. It revealed that there were 40% less incidents involving pilot error, attributable to better training and technology that aids pilot decision making.

The best way out of trouble is not to get 040 03 03 01 into it, which is easier said than done with an intimidating passenger or management. You, the pilot, are the decision-maker - in fact, under the Chicago Convention, your word is law in flight, but the other side of the coin is that you are responsible for what goes on. Aviation is noticeable for its almost constant decisionmaking. As you fly along, particularly in a helicopter, you're probably updating your next engine-off landing point every minute or so. Or maybe you're keeping an eye on your fuel and continually calculating your endurance. It all adds to the many tasks you're meant to keep up to date with, because the situation is always changing. In fact, a decision not to make a decision (or await developments) is also a decision, always being aware that we don't want indecision. To drive a car 1 mile, you must process 12,000 pieces of information - that's 200 per second at 60 mph! It has to be worse with flying, and possibly over our limits - human capabilities for the processing of information are actually quite marginal, being able to deal with only one thing at a time, and vulnerable to fatigue and stress - the most demands are at the beginning and end of a flight, but the latter is when you are most tired and your heart rate is highest.

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Decision making provides a structured, systematic approach to the analysis of changes during flight and how they may affect its safe outcome, of which risk management (discussed later) is an important component. It involves the generation of alternative courses of action based on several factors, which may include available knowledge, past experience, stress, etc. It can be supported by written information, like checklists or SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures). In emergencies, decision making requires the distribution of tasks (i.e. delegation) and crew coordination, and it is generally most efficient if the crew adapts their management style to meet the demand. However, a good decision depends in the first place on proper analysis of a situation.

I nfor mat ion Pr ocessing

The way we interpret the information on which we base decisions can be quite complex. With the eyes and ears, which are the main ways of receiving information, the processing is done in the brain, which uses past experience to interpret what it senses - it therefore has expectations, and can pre-judge a situation. In fact, as accident reports routinely show, in high stress conditions, the brain may even blank out information not directly concerned with the task in hand. Certainly, the processing of information before it is brought to our conscious attention is done in such a way as to protect our 1-16

self-esteem and confidence. In other words, when people act contrary to their self-identity, anything that doesn't pass through that filter is either rejected or made to fit. Information processing usually means the interpretation of signals from the sensory organs by the brain, which can be selective. It is the process of receiving information through the senses, analysing it and making it meaningful.

This is represented by the diagram below.

In the process, physical stimuli, such as sound and sight, are given attention and must be perceived as important before being received into sensory memory for final interpretation by the Central Decision Maker (the thinking and reasoning area inside the brain), in conjunction with Short Term (STM) or Long Term Memory (LTM). Some processes can bypass all that completely, such as motor programs, which operate subconsciously, but such EASA Professional Pilot Studies

automatic decision making only comes with experience. In short, the brain processes information in four stages: • Sensation • Perception • Decision • Response Although there may be lots of input, there is only one channel out of the Central Decision Maker, which must be shared when things are busy. Anything not currently being attended to is held in short term memory. The system works also in reverse, in that feedback on results can be used to improve knowledge and future judgment. Perception at this point means converting that information into something that is immediately meaningful, or realising that it's relevant to what you're doing (you only perceive what you can conceive). What comes out depends on past experience of those events, your expectations, and whether you're able to cope with the information at that time (or are even paying attention). Good examples are radio transmissions, which you can understand, even if you can't hear them properly, because you expect certain items to be included, and you know from experience that they're bad anyway. One danger is that you may hear what you want to hear and not what is actually sent. Another is seeking information to confirm the model (making the ground fit the map). 1-17

Perception is extremely resistant to correction.

Rscheearch sohws taht it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod aeappr, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rhgit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huanm mnid does not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. In flight, however, as a “Central Decision Maker”, you take on the role of an information processor - in this, you have a unique talent, in that decisions can be made without having all the relevant information to hand. If you were to ask a computer to choose between a clock that was gaining five minutes a day, and one that had stopped completely, it would probably choose the one that had stopped, because it was accurate twice a day, as opposed to once every 60 days or so. Machines cannot discriminate, and they need all relevant information, which is good if you just want them to report facts, as with instruments, but not if you want them to make decisions. Thus, the human information processing system is highly efficient when compared to computers because it is flexible. On the other hand, human performance degrades in more subtle ways than with machines, which either work or they don’t.

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Information processing comes in two flavours: • Bottom Up, where the brain uses the data from the senses to build up a picture of the situation (also called Data Driven processing), and • Top Down (Conceptually Driven), where the information gathered is analysed as a whole without bothering with the detail, so there is an influence from prior knowledge. Top-down processing utilises existing hypotheses of reality to process incoming data. It is the most susceptible to error. For example, bottom up processing is used when first learning to read music, where you might read the notes individually, but top down processing starts when you begin to recognise the chords made by the notes as complete pictures. Where Top Down interacts with Bottom Up, you get Interactive Processing. The rate of information processing increases under stress, but the range of attention narrows.

Sensations and perception come before learning (discussed later), and memory is the result. The word can mean either a storage place, a means of moving data in and out of it, and the data itself. It describes the ability to recall or recognise information or events that have been previously learnt or experienced (Ormrod, 2001). How long information is stored depends on its level of processing.

Memory is a feature in human information processing. We need it to learn new things - without it, we could not capture information, or draw on past experience to apply it in new situations (i.e. remembering). Thus, there are three processes involved in using memory: • input (or encoding) • storage • retrieval any one of which can fail and make you think you’re losing your memory, though this can depend on whether the items are placed in short or long term memory. However, to encode something in the first place, it must be given attention, before it can be perceived against all the other stuff going on. This means that much of what we are exposed to never even enters the memory, and thus is not available for recall. As a result, what are often called memory problems are really lapses in attention. In 1951, EASA Professional Pilot Studies

Dr. Wilder Penfield began a series of scientific experiments in which he proved that, by touching the temporal cortex with a weak electrical probe, the brain could be caused to play back some past experiences, and the feelings associated with them, despite the patients not normally being able to recall them. He came to the following widely accepted conclusions: • The brain acts like a tape recorder. We may forget experiences, but they are recorded somewhere. • The brain also records the feelings associated with the experiences, and they stay locked together. • A person can exist in two states simultaneously (patients replaying hidden events and feelings could talk about them objectively at the same time). • Hidden experiences when replayed are vivid, and affect how we feel at the time of replaying. • There is a connection between mind and body, or a link between the biological and the psychological. Anyhow, most psychologists (by no means all!) agree that there are 3 types of memory:

INSTINCT (SENSORY MEMORY)

SHORT TERM MEMORY (STM)

What Jung called “race memory” gives an immediate (gut reaction) response to a stimulus, like being hard-wired. Some psychologists call this sensory memory, as it provides a raw reaction to sensory input (a knee jerk*).

Otherwise known as working, or active, memory by later theorists, this is for data that is used and forgotten almost instantly, or is used for current information (actually, nothing is ever forgotten, but the point is that Short Term Memory is for "on the spot" work, such as fuel calculations or ATC clearances, and figures greatly with situational awareness, which can follow short term memory’s limitations). STM involves information from the present or immediate past, and can only handle somewhere between 5-9 items at a time (that is, 7 ± 2), unless some tricks are used, such as grouping or association (chunking), meaning that what can be held in short term memory depends on the rules used for its organisation, which are in long-term memory. Mnemonics are also good (such as HASELL), since STM appears to like words, albeit taking things rather literally - words will be recalled exactly, and in the order they were processed, unlike in long term memory, which may recall their meaning instead. Thus, short term memory stores information as sounds, rather than pictures, and it is almost error-free.

*A stereotypical and involuntary reaction of the organism on stimulation of its receptors is called a reflex. That is, it can retain information long enough to allow you to decide whether a stimulus is important or not, or whether it is for the eyes or ears. It allows us to pay attention to one thing whilst being aware of and able to process events in wider surroundings (the Cocktail Party Effect (discussed below) is a good example). Iconic Store is where visual images are kept for about half a second. Echoic memory (for the ears) might last for between 250 milliseconds up to a few seconds. The Haptic Store retains physical senses of touch and internal muscle tensions. The slight delay allows you to string connected events together and remember a series of words as a structured sentence until the Central Decision Maker can cope with the input. There are as many sensory registers as there are senses. Information that is not lost from sensory memory is passed on to.

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Data in short term memory typically lasts between 20-30 seconds, and is highly sensitive to distraction. It is probably what Einstein was referring to when he thought that, as soon as one fact was absorbed, one was discarded (there are only 27 lines to the Xanadu poem, because Coleridge was disturbed by the milkman). 1-20

As short term memory tends to hold information for immediate use, don’t expect to remember short term information - write clearances down!

Because the capacity of short-term memory is so limited, items must clamour for attention, which may be based on emotion, personal interest, or the unusual. As mentioned, you can extend working memory's capabilities, either by rehearsal (mental repetition), or chunking (associating items with each other), or breaking up the information into sequences, as you might with a telephone number. The sequence of letters ZNEBSEDECREM becomes a lot easier to remember once you realise it is MERCEDES BENZ backwards, and suddenly your short term memory has 5 or so spaces for more information. Information is therefore often modified as it is stored, being encoded for easier recall. EASA Professional Pilot Studies

Just to prove that short term memory really is limited in its holding capacity, read out the following 15 words to a few people, taking one or two seconds per word, and get them to write down as many of them afterwards as they can remember. Most people will get 7, and some (around 55%) will include sleep, even though it wasn't there in the first place, proof that we sometimes hear what we want to hear, and that eyewitness testimony can be suspect, which is why the test was developed in the first place (by Washington University in St Louis). The words are: bed, rest, awake, tired, dream, snooze, wake, blanket, doze, slumber, snore, nap, peace, yawn, drowsy. Expectation bias is the name for “seeing” what you expect to see, even if it isn’t there. However, expertise can increase short term memory capacity, as does timing - NASA found that football players learning tricky new manoeuvres did so better at 3 in the afternoon rather than 9 in the morning. The early session was as bad for learning as if the players had had only three hours’ sleep the night before. Some say that it is not working memory's capacity that is lacking, but its processing ability. Short term memory impairment starts at 12 000 feet (due to hypoxic hypoxia), but it can be affected at 8 000 feet. Ultra short term memory lasts for about 2 seconds, and acts like a buffer, in that it stores information until we are ready to deal with it in its proper time slice, although it 1-21

may actually be handled by control processes such as rehearsal, or repetition. Unfortunately, you cannot do any chunking or association without .

read to them at 9 AM, but could recall more details if they were read to at 3 PM. Storage of information in LTM would thus appear to be better in the latter half of the day.

LONG TERM MEMORY (LTM)

**Long term memory is affected by Expectation, Suggestion and Repetition.

This is where all our basic knowledge (memories of childhood, training, etc.) is kept, with more capacity and ability to retain information than short-term memory - its storage capacity is regarded as unlimited, and possibly consists of several interlaced systems, such as semantic memory (for facts and figures, and basic knowledge of the world), episodic memory (specific events), procedural memory (for skills) and generic memory, according to some sources. Semantic and episodic memory together are called Declarative Memory. Episodic memory is influenced by our expectations of what should have happened. It is affected the most by amnesia. LTM works better when dealing with information that has special relevance or meaning, whereas short-term memory is more meaning-free. Where training is concerned, many processes can be carried out automatically in LTM, with little thinking. Repetition** (or rehearsing) is used to get information into it, combined with organising it, placing it into some sort of context or associating it with an emotion (when studying, concentrate on the meaning rather than the subject matter). The time of day also has an effect schoolchildren were better at immediate recall of a story EASA Professional Pilot Studies

It is interesting to note that the nervous system has a rhythm of arousal that peaks around 20:00, and long-term memory improves as arousal is heightened, reaching a peak late in the day. Short term memory, however, reaches its zenith around 10:00-11:00 - it’s about 15% more efficient in the morning and 15% less in the evening. The reason why long term memory is needed for association purposes is because it contains the rules that give the items meaning. For example, chess players can have extraordinary short term memory for positioning of pieces, if the rules in long-term memory are obeyed. Upon random positioning, short term recall reverts to normality. People with brain damage (after accidents, etc.) can often remember only one type of information, which supports the idea that the above types of memory are quite distinct, and that data can go directly into long term memory. Knowledge stored in long-term memory should be preactivated (with planning and anticipation) so it can be available when required and have the access time reduced. This is the purpose of a briefing before a flight (LTM’s main limitation is that, unless the information in it is accessed from time to time, its retrieval can be difficult). 1-22

If an input is similar to something already in long term memory, there is a tendency to assume that they are the same. This is mindset, where you believe what you want to believe, rather than what is true.

Without trying to turn you into a psychologist, it’s worth noting that the human being as a whole is not just the physical body in which a certain consciousness is active. Back of the body are other elements that must be considered if the whole decision making process is to be understood properly. In fact, the psychological makeup of the average human consists of: • The conscious mind, which deals with the awareness of the present moment (in fact, it is about 7 seconds behind). It has similar characteristics to short term memory. • The subconscious, which consists of memories that can be recalled at will. • The unconscious, which consists of memories that cannot be recalled at will.

term memory. As a pair, they are loosely referred to as “the subconscious”. As proof of its existence, close your eyes and point to the altimeter in your cockpit. Did you point inside your head? No, you pointed outside, so the body is in the mind and not the other way around. Given that the body runs on electricity, and thus has a magnetic field associated with it, it is easy to think of the subconscious as a field around the body that is able to retain impressions and collect information. Each person’s subconscious interacts with that of other people, which is how flight crews can work together without speaking, yet still know what to do. The subconscious is also independent of time. In fact, we are only aware of time as a sequential process because the brain simply cannot handle a lot of information at once. It has to be dealt with one piece after another. The point is that most decision making happens in the subconscious mind, based on our expectations, beliefs and habits, etc. The trick is accessing its information and influencing it, which is unfortunately beyond the scope of the syllabus.

The boundary between the subconscious and unconscious is not as well defined as that between them and the conscious mind. Instead, they are regarded as merging at some point where memories cannot be recalled at will. Both of them combined share the characteristics of long EASA Professional Pilot Studies

Sensat ion & Percep tion

This is the process of giving meaning to what is sensed, or interpreting, organising and elaborating on the input, discarding anything nonrelevant. It is the other end of a process involving sensation which uses a set of cognitive processes to organise, make sense of, store, retrieve and apply the data you get from your senses. Without cognitive processing, the data received by your senses is useless. So, sensation is the physical side and perception is the psychological side of what we do. To collect data with your senses, you need: © Phil Croucher Electrocution Technical Publishers 2016

• A stimulus. • A sensory organ to convert the stimulus into a nerve impulse. • A nerve pathway to carry the impulse to the brain. • An area in the brain to receive and process the impulse. Much of our sensory and perceptual processing is automatic and unconscious. In fact, the brain is constantly receiving and processing data, but only so much of it gets through because it is below a certain threshold of attention, which is discussed elsewhere. Variations on the perception theme could come from:

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• The stimulus itself. For example, the moon at the horizon appears larger than when overhead, even though the image on the retina will be the same, because many of the visual cues for greater distance occur when it is viewed near land. • The situation, or the context in which an image is viewed. The figures 1 and 3 could be seen as the letter B if they are together in a list of letters. • The state of the perceiver regarding motivation or emotion, or memories and expectations. If you are hungry, pictures of food can appear to be brighter, and the colour of a drink can has been shown to affect the taste of its contents. Perception therefore happens in the brain, after a stimulus has been detected by the sense organs. The process by which information gets to the brain is called transduction. The brain distinguishes between stimuli by paying attention to the part of it that is activated. The Gestalt Theory relates to perception and organisation. Proprioceptors (“seat-of-the-pants sense”) do not orient you to your surroundings, but inform you of the relative motion and relative position of your body parts. They can give false inputs to body orientation when visual reference is lost. Subcutaneous (under the skin) pressure receptors are stimulated by pressure on the corresponding body parts when sitting, standing or lying down. 1-24

The minimum level of stimulation that must occur before anything is noticed for most humans in ideal conditions is: • Sight - A candle flame seen from 17 miles away • Touch - a bee’s wing falling on your cheek from 1 cm away • Taste - 1 teaspoon of sugar in 2 gallons of water • Smell - 1 drop of perfume in a 3-roomed house • Hearing - The ticking of a watch 20 feet away

A shark, on the other hand, can sense one drop of blood in thousands of gallons of water!

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Sensory stimulation is the first stage of 040 02 02 01 information processing, and the basis of perception is the intensity of the stimulus. • The absolute threshold is the minimum level (for a sensor) at which a stimulus is noticed, for 50% of the time. It depends not only on the data sensed, but also our psychological state, including experience, expectations and motivation, so the same stimulus can produce different responses at different times. For example, you will notice a lower stimulus if you are looking for it. • The increase in stimulation required for us to notice a change between two stimuli (for 50% of the time) is the difference threshold or the Just Noticeable Difference (JND). The JND involves Weber’s Law, which states that, as the strength of an original stimulus increases, the magnitude of the change must also increase for a JND to be perceived. The JND threshold is therefore variable, in that it depends on the background against which changes are detected, and the strength of the original stimulus. Thus, changes between two thresholds may not be noticed and may build up in flight to extreme attitudes, hence the need to watch those instruments. If a sensory threshold increases, sensitivity decreases. 1-25

T HE C OCKTAIL P ARTY E FFECT

This is an early term used in attention research, which is now sometimes referred to as the lunch-queue effect (cocktail parties are old fashioned).

It helps shield us from too much sensory input, being the ability to pick up relevant information unintentionally, allowing us to zero in on what is important to us while filtering out unimportant data, like focussing your listening attention on a single talker amongst a mix of background noise, ignoring other conversations (Arons, 1992; "The Cocktail"). According to Clifford (2005), the effect can occur when we are either paying attention to one of the sounds around us, or when it is invoked by a stimulus which grabs our attention suddenly. For example, if someone the other side of a party calls out your name, you notice that sound and respond to it immediately, while still paying some attention to the original group. Or, during a conversation in the cockpit, you respond to your callsign over the RT. As it happens, much of the early work about this can be traced to problems faced by air traffic controllers in the early 1950s, when they received many messages simultaneously over loudspeakers - it was very difficult to distinguish single voices from the many. Colin Cherry, at MIT in 1953, conducted perception experiments in which subjects were asked to listen to two different messages from speakers at the same time, and try to separate them. EASA Professional Pilot Studies

It was revealed that our ability to separate sounds from the background is based on the characteristics of the sounds, like the gender of the speaker, or the direction from which the sound is coming, pitch, or the speaking speed, although spatial differences in the location of the sources greatly assists this ability. "Our minds can be conceived as a radio receiving many channels at once"; each channel perceives a kind of sound, but we can pay attention to only one channel at a time because of our limited capacity, so there is an audio filter in our brain which selects the channel to which we should pay attention from many sounds perceived. This is Broadbend's Filter Theory.

All the stimulation in the world is no good if you ignore it! Attention is a limited resource that can be affected by distraction*, selectivity or motivation, which is where habit takes over. You can omit essential actions after interruptions in your work because you are not paying attention (action slip). You can also include actions associated with the interruption in the original sequence of actions. A premature exit (relevant for engineers) is terminating a job before all is complete. *Distraction is the divided attention of an individual from a chosen object of attention onto the source of the distraction, often suffered by engineers.

As mentioned above, the human body is not a good multitasker, and to keep the various balls in the air over a typical flight, we must learn to prioritise and switch rapidly between tasks, which depends on how much attention the primary task is demanding. This can be reduced by using standard procedures, as the less thought secondary tasks require, the less attention they take up, especially when an external event happens to upset those well-made plans and flood the system.

One type of pilot simply flies the aircraft. Another helps to deliver passengers safely to their destinations. Which would you rather fly with? There are several types of attention, but the most important are the first two described below: DIVIDED ATTENTION

This is the alternative management of several matters of interest at (almost) the same time, as when monitoring the progress of a motor program on a relatively subconscious level whilst making a radio call (time sharing). In this case, some tasks may suffer at the expense of others, especially if they are similar in nature.

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With this, you give greater attention to one or more sources of input out of several (the cocktail party effect is a good example). Such a selective mechanism is required because the resources of the Central Decision Maker and short-term memory are limited. It is the process during which information is sampled to see if it is relevant, which makes you able to detect information meant for you, even if you are not specifically monitoring the source. FOCUSSED ATTENTION

Where you focus on a single source and avoid distraction, with the danger of missing something important. SUSTAINED ATTENTION

This is the ability to stay alert over long periods of time, often on one task. VIGILANCE

040 03 06 01 The amount of attention given to a task is directly influenced by vigilance, which is defined as the degree of activation of the Central Nervous System. When humans get involved in monitoring tasks, such as making sure the autopilot doesn’t misbehave, there is a noticeable decline in performance after about 30 minutes. After this time, problems are identified more slowly.

Ad apt at i on Sensory receptors are quick to adapt to their surroundings, which is an effect commonly found when with instrument flying. Adaptation occurs when the response to a stimulus decreases after being exposed to it continually - in other words, the senses get used to it (as when sleeping through traffic noise, or turning slowly). The sense of smell is quickest to adapt, but IFR pilots know this happens with the sense of balance as well (the leans).

What I s A Decision? In simple terms, the mental processes used in determining a course of action. It is supposed to be the end result of a chain of events involving judgment, after which you choose between alternatives. The process involves not only our eyes and ears which gather data, but our attention, which should not be preoccupied all the time. To keep track of what's going on, you must split your attention for a short period between everything, typically a split second at a time, having prioritised all the tasks that need to be completed. Risk assessment, discussed at the end of this section, is part of the process, as is timing, as a good decision that is made too late is useless*, although this does not mean that you should become impulsive. *It’s a good decision to avoid the mountain in front of you, but not 30 seconds before you hit it!

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Although decision making is a systematic and analytical process involving several steps, things often seem to happen all at once, so it's important not to get fixated on one thing at the expense of another, which is typically what happens when flying under pressure. Gather all the information you can in the time available or, better still, get in the habit of updating information you're likely to need in an emergency as the flight progresses, especially when single-pilot, because then you will have much of the information you need in place. For example, when faced with time pressure, as when starting an instrument approach, prepare for it by getting the weather in advance, considering alternatives, etc. This also helps to activate the relevant information in long-term memory. There are three elements to the evaluation process. Diagnosis comes first (which is more of a skill than is thought), followed by the generating of possible solutions and the assessment of any risks, further described below. When evaluating a situation, you should stay as cool as possible and not let emotions cloud your decision* - that is, do not let false hopes affect your thinking, as they might if your engine fails over trees - you first have to get over the idea that you will hit something! Once you have all the information, of course, there is no point in delaying the making of the decision, which must be followed by action! When other crew members are involved, time should always be taken to explain the reasons for a decision, even if it is after landing. 1-28

*Within the limits of short term memory. A poor decision is often attributed to faulty reasoning. For example, from the fact that cats and dogs both have four legs, you might conclude that a cat is a dog. Alternatively, if a pilot comes from a broken home, and you know that people who come from broken homes are social misfits, you might also conclude that the pilot concerned is a social misfit. In this case, your faulty conclusion arises from a false premise, because not all people from broken homes are social misfits. In addition to misinterpreting a premise, you might rely on cherished beliefs rather than logical analysis, where you know that a part of an engine is prone to give problems, but, when troubleshooting, you automatically assume that the part is causing the problem, and don’t look anywhere else for the cause (stereotyping). “The least experienced press on, while the more experienced turn back to join the most experienced who never left the ground in the first place.”

Some steps involved with making a decision are to: • Gather all relevant information - using your senses (which may be wrong). • Review it. • Analyze alternatives, keeping situational awareness and using risk assessment. When you are in a hurry, correct analysis may be bypassed in favour of a decision prepared beforehand. • Decide and Do - make your choice and act on it, although other factors may affect the quality of your decision and your ability to implement it. • Evaluate the outcome - and be prepared to start all over again (know when to fold ‘em). CRM’s function, in the guise of better crew interaction, is actually to facilitate the decision making process, but the popular conception is the opposite, i.e. that CRM is part of DM. You will notice that the problem solving comes first and the decision making comes late in the process, at the Decide & Do stage. The point about decision-making, as distinct from problem solving (see Learning & Performance), is that the possible solutions are already known - you are faced with various alternatives, from which you have to make a choice. Problem solving involves reconciling a present position with a goal, with no obvious way of getting there

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- it is an attempt to achieve the goal through a series of logical stages, which might include defining the problem, generating possible solutions and evaluating them, which leads to the decision-making process - the last two options above. Problem solving has two types of thinking associated with it: • Convergent thinking brings information together • Divergent thinking generates different answers to one problem

The former requires more initial effort, whereas the latter requires more work towards the end. The above decision making steps are not rigid, but may be merged or even repeated in a situation. For example, when adverse weather is ahead, you might get the updated weather, then vary the route or land to wait it out. Then you might get airborne and find you have to do it all over again, but this time land for refuelling, before getting airborne once more. The whole thing can be a continuously evolving process, which can be made quicker if some experience has already been gained, hence the value of training, which can allow you to make short cuts. However, in normal life, what usually happens is that the thinking comes afterwards. When shopping for a house, for example, you might look at the outside and decide you like it there and then, until you discover that there is a EASA Professional Pilot Studies

factory around the corner that works all night, or the shops are too far away to walk to, or the neighbours are nasty. Or you take the line of least resistance and follow the actions that seem to work as far as you can - only when you have bought some time, or see that your actions are not leading anywhere, do you think about changing anything - this is often what happens in an emergency. You are more decisive when you can make sense of the selections available, which includes cutting the list to manageable proportions, as the more choice you have, the more you tend to take the easiest path, and too much choice affects decision making, as you cannot handle too much information (try ordering a sandwich in Subway). In fact, the more information you try to absorb, the more chance there is of making critical errors. As your information load increases, so does the activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is a region of the brain behind the forehead that controls decision making and emotions. At some point, when we reach cognitive and information overload, that activity drops sharply, as if a fuse has blown, and we start to make bad choices. In other words, the unconscious system that guides many of our choices can get sidelined by too much information, especially as we have added a new layer of decision making to the whole process, namely whether to give an item of information attention or not before it can be factored in. 1-30

The result is that people faced with too much choice may not make a decision at all. Decisions requiring creativity often benefit from being left to incubate below the level of awareness, as is done when sleeping on a problem.

Because decisions must often be made quickly, we may concentrate on a few relevant facts, perhaps relying on intuition or rules of thumb as short cuts, based on previous experience, or recency. We are hard-wired to give more attention to the latest information, regardless of whether it is correct or not. Two circumstances where past experience can hinder decision making include mental set* (or rigidity), where an older solution is used, even when more efficient ones exist (which could be called reproductive thinking, rather than productive thinking), and functional fixedness, where we fail to see other solutions than the normal ones (in other words, think out of the box). *Set, or the tendency for mental processes to be channelled in one direction under expectations based on past experience, is a characteristic of the survival mechanism which allows you to blank out unwanted stimuli while you get on with an emergency. Thus, you can put yourself into a set that sees the world in a certain way and be so fixated on a bulb in a gear down light that isn’t working that you forget to put the gear down! This happened on a TriStar in Florida. EASA Professional Pilot Studies

Under stress, or high states of arousal, there is a tendency to stereotype, your attention narrows and the quality of your decisions becomes less. You become more liable to problems with set and reversion to previous training - this can become infectious in a crew if the Captain is affected, due to the Authority Gradient. Mental Set is a cognitive banana skin, which describes the frame of mind we are in when we are coasting along on mental autopilot. It occurs when there is very little time to process information and have to take certain things for granted. Perceptual set relates this to the perception process, meaning that you see what you want to see. For example, top-down perception comes into play when you make a scene fit what you expect it to be, rather than perceive reality (making the ground fit the map). One example is expecting to see landing gear down lights as green and basing your actions on that premise. Training can reduce the need for making decisions - the reaction to engine failure is pretty much cut and dried, and you only need a decision when there is an element of confusion. However, many decisions can be made before that point to reduce the after effects, such as choosing a good position to be in if something happens. Although the options chosen should lead to the most favourable expected outcome with the least risk (or cost!), this is often not possible. Sometimes there are only two choices, one risky, the other not. Humans tend to risk more to prevent losses. 1-31

Influences on making choices can include randomness (flip a coin), routine (helps with small decisions), rules (start No 1 engine on odd days) and outside influences, say from spouses or friends. The trouble is that our brains were designed for a more simple life, with decision making taken out of the loop. With the vast amount of choices available to us these days we have to think as well - either rationalise our decisions or risk making bad ones. The result is that we choose not to choose, or rationalise a decision afterwards, based on our prejudices and expectations. Another problem is that many decisions are beyond our awareness. Neurophysiologists Benjamin Libet and Bertram Feinstein at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco measured the time for a touch stimulus on a patient’s skin to reach the brain as an electrical signal. Patients also had to press a button once they became aware of being touched. The brain registered the stimulus in 0.0001 of a second, and the button was pressed inside 0.1 second. The interesting bit is that the conscious awareness of either event was not registered for nearly half a second, indicating that the decision to respond arose unconsciously. It has also been found that the brain generates signals for moving muscles 1½ seconds before you decide to do so.

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Analysing decision-making steps in detail is inappropriate in an emergency, which is why you need distribution of tasks and crew coordination first. Sometimes we have to make rapid-fire decisions under high pressure and with little information, but you may be surprised to hear that you might not actually need that much information, especially with proper training, rules and rehearsal. For example, many instructors can size up a student in less than a minute when it comes to deciding whether they will get their pilot’s licence or not, and policemen have their hunches. Sportsmen, too, try to be in something they call The Zone, otherwise known as the present moment, because that’s where things are happening. It’s where they can operate with little conscious thought, and where they ignore what could be or might have been. Sports psychologists help athletes to balance their brains to better control their movements. It’s only when they stop listening to the analytical left brain and allow themselves to go with the flow of the instinctive right brain that they find their best performance. The untrained decision maker can make several characteristic errors: • Not defining the problem properly, particularly when they have preconceptions, or other experience that is not appropriate to the new situation. In an exam, you may read a question as how you would like it to be because you don't have the knowledge to deal with it as it is. This area typically has the 1-32

least time spent on it, but increasing it can reduce the time you need to spend on making the actual decision. For example, what is your criterion when you need to decide on which washing machine to buy? Mine is cheap! Cheapness is a window through which you make a decision, but you need to remember there are other windows, because a window is also a boundary. In other words, don't box yourself in! • Overconfidence in their own abilities and judgment, where key information might be rejected because it does not fit into their world model. To counteract this, you need a devil's advocate - try to look for arguments that disprove what you think is true. This needs discipline, as people neglect evidence that tends to disprove their ideas (confirmation bias). Good decision makers know when to mistrust their judgment! • Plunging in without taking time to find out the real problem. Step back and change the rules if necessary, because you might start gathering wrong information. You can delegate data collection to reduce your workload, provided, of course, that the problem has been correctly defined. • Not checking sources - relying too much on other peoples' opinions or commonly accepted rules of thumb that have not been confirmed. For example, EASA Professional Pilot Studies

your first officer might say that he has done several approaches to a particular airfield, but might omit to mention that this one is his first as a copilot - the others were as a flight engineer! • Having defined the problem, and gathered all relevant data, winging it, with no preparation. You will not be able to carry it all in short term memory, and intuition is not enough! • Ignoring the influence of a group (see Group Decision Making). • Fooling yourself about feedback - is your crew telling you what you want to hear rather than the truth, simply to get you off their back? • Not keeping records to see what happened before, and not reviewing past performance. To summarise, good decision making has 4 elements: • Proper definition of the question or problems. • Intelligence gathering, but not to confirm biases. • Following systematic rules. • Learning from feedback or reviewing your past performance. The above steps may not follow that sequence and may even influence the others - for example, gathered intelligence may lead to a redefinition of the problem. 1-33

The kind of decisions that can have far-reaching effects are actually quite small. Say you have just landed in twilight, and it is reported that your port and starboard navigation lights are not working. These, of course, are required equipment when flying at night. Do you shut down and wait for an engineer to fix them, or stay overnight and try again in the morning? Or do you take off in what is still officially daylight and pretend to yourself that they stopped working while you were in flight, relying on ATC to tell you about other traffic, and put the landing light on, figuring that if things were normal, people wouldn’t see the navigation lights anyway? Anyhow, the normal process is to recognise a change, assess alternative actions, make a decision and monitor the results. This can be enhanced with awareness of undesirable attitudes, learning to find relevant information, and motivation to act in a timely fashion. To introduce yet another acronym, decision making can be based on the DECIDE model, consisting of these steps: • Detect • Estimate • Choose • Identify • Do

The importance of the Evaluate step at the end is to be able to step back and not necessarily press on - this is called plan continuation bias, which is a tendency to continue with what you are doing when changing circumstances require a new plan, otherwise called presson-itis, (or get-home-itis), a phenomenon that is very common in bad weather. Whatever it’s called, it has the effect of increasing the workload right when it should be eased, which diminishes your ability to think ahead. Each decision you make eliminates the choice of another so, once you make a poor one, a chain of them usually follows. In fact, a decision-making chain can often be traced back up to and over fifty years, depending on whether the original cause was a design flaw (the F-15 and F-16, for example, are functionally identical to fly, except that the speed bands go the opposite way in each aircraft). Another factor is the data itself; if it's incomplete, or altered through some emotional process, you can't base a proper decision on it, so: • Don't make a decision unless you have to (which does not mean waiting until the last minute, but using the time you need within the time available). • Keep it under review once you've made it. • No decision can be a decision (but no indecision!)

• Evaluate EASA Professional Pilot Studies

Most important, though, is to be prepared to change a decision! (the Captain in the Dryden Accident should not have tried to take off a second time). Decisions only remain valid for a limited time! Of course, by definition, the nature of most incidents means there’s no time for proper evaluation, and you have to use instinct, experience or training. In this respect, there are two decision-making processes that affect us, both of which really speak for themselves - ample-time and time-critical.

Amp le- Ti me Decision Maki ng You start with the awareness of a situation, which means having some idea of the big picture (similar to the continual updating mentioned above). The situation is developing slowly and you have time to start thinking up alternative courses of action. A good example is flying towards a warm front - once you start seeing the tell-tale clouds, you know that one is close, so you have to start thinking of returning to base or risk having to wait it out if you get caught. SITUATIONAL AWARENESS

040 03 02 02 To avoid erroneous assumptions, we need to maintain a continuous mental model of what is going on around us. Officially, situational awareness is “the ability to accurately perceive what is happening inand outside the aircraft, plus the ability to understand the meaning of different elements in the environment and the EASA Professional Pilot Studies

projection of their status in the near future.” To do this successfully, you have to know how things should be to recognise what's wrong! Situational awareness refers to your knowledge of all relevant information, past or present, conscious or unconscious, which includes your cultural background. The information that contributes to situational awareness comes in through the senses, and is transformed by the brain into a mental model of the situation, through the process of perception. Unfortunately, perception can be modified by past experiences and current expectations, as the brain can be fooled, so someone else’s interpretation of a situation can be quite different from yours, if only because they have had different life experiences. This difference is one reason why communication is so important, because it is essential that all the crew are on the same page. Situational awareness is therefore highest when perception approaches what passes for reality. The main constituent of SA is vigilance, or monitoring without lapses in attention, which uses up energy and processing power (i.e. being alert). Hypervigilance occurs with a high workload, and the overwhelming of people with information, where it is difficult to latch on to what to prioritise first. Hypovigilance is a lack of attention to detail, as you might get when underwhelmed with detail, or bored. Lack of SA leads to tunnel vision and a tendency to ask leading questions. 1-35

It is affected by: • Stress • Interruptions • Fatigue • Boredom

• Poor communications For a good example of situational awareness, imagine overtaking two trucks, one behind the other, in your car. The one behind is going faster than the one in front, and you know that there is a lot of momentum involved in driving a truck, so you figure it isn’t going to slow down, but is more likely to want to overtake instead. You therefore expect the rear truck to want to occupy the lane you are in, so you either slow down, speed up or move over to the next lane to give it room (advanced drivers call this reading the road). In aviation terms, it can be likened to keeping a mental picture of what aircraft are around you, and what they are doing, by listening to ATC. SA involves knowledge of the past, present and future, and requires anticipation, so you need vigilance and continual alertness, with regard to what may happen on top of what is happening, which is difficult at the end of a long day. Most of the information you will base a decision on comes from your instruments and navigation equipment, but this can be affected by your physical state. EASA Professional Pilot Studies

The various levels of situational awareness are as follows: • Level 1 - Monitoring, where you are just keeping abreast with events, and are only reacting to information presented by flight instruments. It is easy to fall behind the aircraft, especially when reading the newspaper on the flight deck, as many do on long flights. There are also differences between active and passive monitoring. • Passive monitoring is indirectly attending to stimuli by conditioned, involuntary, reflexive responses, such as driving your car while thinking about other things. Under these conditions you will only be pulled back to the primary task when something alarming and/or distracting intervenes, like lights, horns, certain signs, emergency situations, etc. From a physiological perspective, passive monitoring involves the subcortex portion of the brain which is associated with reflex activities and automatic responses. • Active monitoring, on the other hand, is consciously and selectively attending to a primary task, such as flying while listening to ATC, as you check your instruments and look for trouble, as it were, also known as being proactive. It involves the cerebral cortex and requires commitment, energy, and effort, which 1-36

can best be achieved through a mindset that recognises the importance and technique of active monitoring. • Level 2 - Evaluate. Slightly more proactive. • Level 3 - Anticipate. Being ahead of the game, and the highest level of situational awareness.

Time-Crit ical De cision Making Where decisions have to be made quickly, based on past experience or training, there is often no time to be creative or think up new solutions. In other words, time dictates your decision, and this is where checklists and SOPs can help, because they will be based on other peoples' experience (training should make your actions as near to reflex as possible, to make way for creative thought). STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURES

The development of procedures makes pilots more effective and reliable in their activities - a process called, predictably, procedural consistency.

situations where groups are formed and dissolved with great regularity, such as flight crews. In a multi-crew environment, they are essential for consistent and predictable responses to routine and emergency situations. They also provide for enhanced morale (meaning less friction) between crew members that is often caused by doing things differently. For pilots who are in training, or new to the Company, they will help to ensure faster integration. Checklists and SOPs are designed to help establish shared mental models and assist with decision making, particularly for infrequent scenarios such as ditching. In essence, they provide pre-determined successful solutions to various situations by accounting for risk factors that may not be readily apparent during an emergency. In most cases, following the procedure in a checklist will provide the safest possible course of action. However, if checklist discipline is not taught, practiced, and reinforced, there is a danger that pilots will not follow the prescribed procedure when it is needed.

Drills, as per the Ops Manual, and checklists are part of rule based performance in Rasmussen’s SRK model (later). They do the same thing on a different scale. Their purpose is to provide a framework on which to base good decision-making, as well as making sure you don't forget anything. SOPs are there to provide standardisation in EASA Professional Pilot Studies

In fact, there are many reasons for SOPs, including: • A logical order of events • Improvement in communication • Better error management • Better workload management and prioritisation • Better situational awareness • Improvements in cross-checking • Limits or acceptance tolerances are set • Conflict resolution (see under Communication)

• Error Reduction Although a checklist doesn't contain policy, it does at least stimulate activity, since the first response of most people in an emergency is to suffer acute brainfade. Either that, or you shoot from the hip, which is equally wrong. Checklists and drills in company operations manuals are intended to be followed to the letter (although they are not always based on the Flight Manual drills, which are there to comply with the requirements of the C of A). Whilst they have their uses, though, they cannot cater for every situation, and you may have to think once in a while and slip into Knowledge-based mode (see later). In such circumstances, it pays to have prehandled many emergencies, but, otherwise, actions take place in two modes, the conscious and the automatic. The former can EASA Professional Pilot Studies

be slow and error-prone, but has more potential for being correct. The latter is largely unconscious and therefore automatic, but it only relies on a database of information (or experience), and is not creative of itself, a problem that may affect inexperienced pilots. MAKING PLANS

Where time is critical, such as whether to stop or carry on taking off if an engine fails on the runway, it pays to have a plan ready if something goes wrong, which is where your training, plus a preflight briefing comes in (run through it by yourself if there’s nobody else). This helps you to visualise the process - golfers see the ball going into the hole before they hit it, and Bell teach you to visualise an engine-off landing before you do one, but there’s no point in having a plan if you don’t execute it! Many accidents happened because the original plan wasn’t followed.

Group Decision Making

Many decisions are made collectively, particularly in families. In theory, therefore, a more cautious element should be built in to the process, with a greater chance of all information being recognised and considered, for more consistency. As it happens, group decisions are more extreme than those of the individual, meaning that an inclination to be cautious or risky will be increased. This is the group polarisation effect. 1-38

Primary groups play an important role in the development of personal identity, being those in which one exchanges implicit items, such as love, caring, concern, animosity and support, like in a family. Relationships formed in primary groups are often longlasting and goals in themselves. They also are often psychologically comforting to the individuals involved and provide a source of support.

People in secondary groups interact on a less personal level, and their relationships tend to be temporary, such as a flight crew, where choice is involved. As such groups are established to perform certain functions, people’s roles in them are more interchangeable. We have three instincts that serve as innate drives, and which must be expressed or converted properly in order to avoid conflict. Society, by and large, does not always allow this to be done, hence the inner tensions or conflicts that are often relieved by weird unconscious processes. Anyhow, these instincts are: • Self, for promotion of the ego • Sex, for procreation • Herd, for protection

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It is the last one that is relevant here. A unanimous group will exert strong pressure to conform - if even one person dissents, the conformity is much less marked. Thus, a minority can influence a group if it maintains a consistent position without appearing to be rigid, arrogant or dogmatic. Even if you are working single-pilot, you are still part of a group - a peer group of other pilots, and the effects are just the same. Many accidents have occurred because people have worried more about how they look to their colleagues than taking the right actions. Differences of opinion should be regarded as helpful. During the early stages of an incident, for example, it may not be easy to determine exactly what is going on, and what should be done. People look to someone in authority (i.e. the Captain) for such information. If there is no one, people often feel unable to make their own decisions as they do not wish to stand out from the crowd. In fact, one of the ways a situation can be regarded as dangerous or not is by other peoples’ reactions to it. If they are maintaining a calm exterior, as is done in some cultures, a situation could be seen as less dangerous than it really is, as people don’t want to be seen to be over-reacting. People will try to live up to group norms (e.g. teenagers), which can be set quite quickly, even in a group that hasn’t met much before.

A norm is an unwritten rule that is followed by the majority of a group. Norms are therefore a code of behaviour (or a culture) which can be very powerful, and rejection is a danger if you don’t conform to them. For example, it may be the norm in your company that people who make mistakes are ridiculed. Airmanship is a norm. A positive norm (see left) is one where expected behaviour is Norman condoned and contributes to the betterment of the group. Washing down an aircraft after a flight, even if it isn’t your job, is one example. A neutral norm is one that is neither positive or negative, which does not detract nor enhance an accepted standard, so there is no great impact. A negative norm (or a violation) is a short cut or accepted practice that detracts from safety, which is why Chernobyl exploded - the engineers left out most of the safety procedures when they were trying an experiment. Drinking and driving used to be a good example, and in the days of the Titanic it was normal practice to steam straight ahead at high speed, even though the rules said they shouldn’t.

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Re sp onses Following a decision, based on a stimulus, there is a response. However, one resulting from excessive pressure is more likely to be based on insufficient data and be wrong than a more considered one, assuming time permits. If you make a rushed decision, you are more likely to overlook analysis of the current situation and apply a decision prepared earlier, although you shouldn’t change a plan unnecessarily; a previously made one based on sound thinking is more likely to work than one cooked up on the spur of the moment, provided, of course that the situation is the same or similar. A correct, rather than rapid, reaction is appropriate. Response times will vary according to the complexity of the problem, or the element of expectation and hence preparedness (we are trained to expect engine failures, for example, but not locked controls, so the reaction time to the former will be less). Pushing a button as a response to a light illuminating will take about 1/5 th of a second, but add another light and button and this will increase to a second or so. An unexpected stimulus increases reaction time to nearly 5 seconds. There is a time delay between perceiving information and responding to it, which is typically 3.4 seconds. The reason we don't take this long to answer in normal conversation is because we anticipate what they are going to say, which could lead to

Decision Making Models

misinterpretation without body language to help, as you might get with using radio.

Dr. Daniel Stern studied a movie of Muhammad Ali at 24 years of age fighting in Frankfurt. He found that just over half of Ali’s left jabs were faster than 9/50 of a second. His opponent, Mildenberger, threw left jabs faster than that for about a third of the time he was in the ring. They were too rapid to be traditional stimuli and responsi (joke). Obviously, Ali did not signal his punches, yet nearly all of his blows were blocked or avoided. In fact, he only won by a technical knockout. The answer is that Mildenberger’s brain was decoding Ali’s predicted behaviour patterns and anticipating them. Similarly, in life, our actions can overlap in time and appear to be simultaneous, when, actually, they are not.

DECISION MAKING MODELS Effective decision making involves the accurate understanding of a situation, an appreciation of its implications, the formulation of plans and contingencies, followed by the implementation of the best course of action. Equally important is a crew's ability to recognise changes and to start over if necessary. Increased stress levels can adversely impact the ability to perceive and evaluate cues from the environment and may result in the narrowing of attention, which can lead to confirmation bias, so worst-case scenarios should specifically be included so that all aspects are considered. Another important aspect is the concept of shared mental models. These are largely dependent on the understanding of the circumstances, expectations about the future, and past experience. The more experience an individual has, the more accurate their mental model is likely to be.

Rasmussen’s SRK Model Rasmussen isolated three types of information processing demands, or behaviour, and hence the likely errors, in his SRK (Decision Making) Model, which refers to the conscious control exercised by people doing their thing. Put another way, the model is directed at those in supervisory positions, particularly during emergencies, having originated from a study of technicians involved in electronic troubleshooting. EASA Professional Pilot Studies

Decision Making Models

AUTOMATIC S KILL - BASED

Human performance at this level is governed by stored patterns of preprogrammed instructions, meaning that it is based on practice and prior learning, to become part of the "muscle memory", or motor programs, of your body, so reactions are largely unconscious and automatic, or routine, and are not consciously monitored once selected. An example is a pilot knowing how much power is being used by the positioning of his arm, and not by looking at the instruments. Automatic or skill-based behaviour can be less prone to error or, put another way, more reliable, because you get early feedback to correct things. It is when you are very familiar with a task, and are tired or interrupted (a major problem for engineers!) and you have to start thinking in a way you are not used to when the task is resumed, that errors might rear their heads. The classic example of outof-sequence behaviour concerns the rotor blades on a Bell 206 - if the passengers are late, you tie the blades down while you wait for them and forget to undo them again! Because motor programs are not continuously monitored, skill-based behaviour can lead to environmental capture, that is, doing something because it's always done and not because it's the right thing to do. You could also end up with the right skill in the wrong situation (action slip), meaning pulling the flap lever instead of that for the gear. EASA Professional Pilot Studies

As well, you might not catch new stimuli in automatic mode, and one other disadvantage is that it is difficult to explain (and thus pass on) to other people. Modification of skill-based learning requires it to be relearnt at a deep level, so experienced pilots are the most affected. In summary, you are prone to errors here when you are preoccupied, tired, or otherwise distracted, so you must be consciously aware of your actions, and more deliberate. Keep alert enough to sustain your attention, and maintain currency - Wiegman & Shappell have shown that over 80% of general aviation accidents can be put down to skill-based errors, where pilots are not flying properly, and currency is an issue. Automation does not help! In a co-ordinated turn, most of your activity is skill-based, as is the choice of the moment you select the gear down. Associated errors include: • Errors of Routine • Environmental Capture • Action Slips. Otherwise called absent-mindedness, these are attentional failures, such as not completing events through lack of monitoring, or inserting or omitting parts of a checklist. They appear during highly practised activities where you would expect to make fewer mistakes because, in the early stages of an activity, you pay more attention - when you

Decision Making Models

get more skilled and the process becomes more automatic, the control and monitoring is lost. CONSCIOUS

040 03 04 02 This relies on previously considered courses of action, or stored rules, and follows procedures, like checklists and SOPs (if this, do that), so it is a slower process, and more sequential. If you approach an airfield under VFR, at a prescribed altitude, exactly following the approach procedure, you would appear to show rule-based behaviour. The mental processing is still internalised (it is in long term memory) but it is event driven, such as "if the nose pitches up, apply forward control." That is, there is little anticipation. One example of a rule-based error concerns the DC-10 that had an engine fall off the wing shortly after takeoff. In the simulator afterwards, it was found that the pilot had applied the correct nose-up pitch, but had less been applied, he might have been able to keep the aircraft flying (albeit very close to buildings!) rather than crashing. Or say an engine catches fire shortly after takeoff - in a large transport aircraft, the fuel should be dumped before landing because the machine will be too heavy, but fire will burn through the wing quicker than you can do that. Far better may be to break the rules and land heavy, where you might only bend the gear and not wreck the aircraft. EASA Professional Pilot Studies

What usually happens when an accident occurs is that the brain goes smartly into neutral whilst everything around you goes pear-shaped. Checklists can help to bridge the gap of inactivity by giving you something more or less correct to do whilst psyching yourself up and evaluating information ready for a decision. The US Navy, for example, trains pilots to stop in emergencies, and reset the clock on the instrument panel, which forces them to relax or, at least, not to panic. Rule-based behaviour is generally robust, which is why procedures and rules are important, but you can use the wrong procedure due to misdiagnosis, or even forget it. Associated errors include: • Errors of Technical Knowledge • Commission (most common), such as taxying to the wrong runway or using the wrong checklist. • Departure from SOPs • Interruptions • Violations It follows that the rules should be precise and not assume a minimum level of knowledge to be used properly! Rule-based errors can be minimised by following the rules rather than doing things "the way we do it round here", which is something that instructors can help with by not passing on bad habits. Also, make sure that you use the 1-43

Decision Making Models

right rules for the right task! Don't apply the start sequence of one aircraft to another! Use the checklist! However, it's worth noting that being overly rule-based can mean losing the broader aspects of situational awareness, or the big picture, leading to misdiagnoses that will have the same result, even with the right actions (try not to ignore the evidence from your instruments). The pilots in the Airbus that ran out of fuel near the Azores assumed a computer error when the oil temperature indication was low, but fuel gushing out was doing the cooling! Then they used the wrong checklist.

rules. As your primary weapons are thinking and reasoning, this is probably the only area that machines cannot cope with, and why we still need humans in the cockpit to make proper decisions. For example, the captaincy example involving a decision to return to base or carry on used elsewhere is knowledge based. Errors at this level might arise from making diagnoses without full knowledge of a system. To combat them, don't deal with too much data at a time, because of short-term memory’s limitations, and you might become selective in your attention to various parts of the task.

K NOWLEDGE - BASED

Associated errors arise from resource limitations and incomplete or incorrect knowledge. They include:

Knowledge-based tasks are those for which there is no external guidance, so there is almost complete conscious control. Thinking on your feet requires considerable mental effort, and your responses will be correspondingly slower, aside from needing to review them constantly to assess their impact. Humans do not perform very well in such situations, but they do perform better than machines, which are more suited to the other two modes. People who apply previous experience from an outside source to cope with a current task are good examples, such as an aeroplane pilot caught in Vortex Ring on a helicopter who instinctively pulls power to get out of trouble, unaware, without special training, that that will only make things worse. This is the sort of thinking you apply if you need to think things through, or maybe work on the why so the how becomes apparent, because there are no applicable EASA Professional Pilot Studies

• Confirmation Bias, which is the tendency to search for information to confirm a theory, while overlooking contradictory information. It can be likened to making the ground fit the map, rather than accepting the fact that we are lost, because we are more likely to disregard a negative idea. You could also look upon it as a tendency to ignore information that confirms a decision is a poor one. You should therefore look for things that are wrong to help confirm your decision. • Frequency Bias, where a previously prepared response for another emergency may be used instead, leading to errors of commission. 1-44

Decision Making Models

Generic Error Modelling System (GEMS)

Professor Reason extended the SRK model by describing how people switch between the various modes mentioned above. For example, an experienced instrument pilot might be in skill-based mode for everyday flying, with only occasional monitoring of the aircraft’s progress. However, if a check reveals a problem, or an alarm sounds, he might switch to rule- or knowledge-based activity to gather information from the instruments before attempting a diagnosis or taking action. Unsuitable rules, or situations when the rules do not apply, determine the transition from rule-based to knowledge-based activity. Once the problem is solved, you can then revert to skillbased mode.

040 01 03 Human factors concerns the interaction between people and machines, procedures, and the environment. The SHEL model is one factor of decision making that was originally presented by a psychologist called Edwards. It is a framework that describes the components and interfaces between the various subsystems to do with aviation. Its proper application can help prevent errors, and is a particular factor in the design of flight decks.

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The letters stand for Software, Hardware, Environment and Liveware, which represent influences on the typical pilot. Hardware is the mechanical environment, Environment covers such things as hypoxia, temperature, etc., while Software covers checklists, etc. Liveware concerns the pilot (in the centre) and other people. Of course, humans can vary considerably in terms of the above. They can, however, be controlled in terms of pilot selection (not too tall, or short), and standardisation. LIVEWARE-HARDWARE

This is the first area that needs attention. Adjustable seats and controls are a good start (ergonomics, mentioned overleaf), but displays are important as well. As an example, the 3-needle altimeter was a classic example of poor design that led to accidents, where people confused the hundred- and thousand-foot needles (see right). EFIS/ECAS displays are also not entirely satisfactory because, although they present a lot of information in a small space, they fail to show patterns and trends, and it is harder to read digits than it is to read analogue dials, where you get used to a picture of needle positions, and any misplaced are easily noticed. When you read numbers, it takes a second or two to interpret the information. Analogue presentation is most suitable for qualitative or comparative information. 1-45

Decision Making Models

Here is the same checklist, suitably tweaked:

Liveware-software problems occur when documentation is poorly written and presented (this also includes warning systems). Below is an example of the sort of checklist that comes from a typical Chief Pilot’s office. It would appear to do the job quite well, but closer inspection reveals that it could do with a little work here and there.

For example, it is not obvious what are headings and what are not.

It didn’t take much effort to improve things, with a little spacing and layout, in keeping with the SHEL model.

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Decision Making Models

Contrast this with this example from the airline world, which violates almost every rule of technical writing:

patterns and shifts that fail to take account of sleep disturbance and jet lag. Prolonged noise, vibration or turbulence is fatiguing and annoying - noise is particularly prevalent in helicopters, especially with the doors off. Vibration at the right frequency (8-12 Hz) causes back pain. The others include: • 1-4 Hz - Affects breathing (1/10-2 Hz affects the vestibular apparatus) • 4-10 Hz - Chest and abdominal pain

• 8-12 Hz - Backache • 10-20 Hz - Headaches, eye strain, throat pain, speech disturbance & muscular tension • 30-40 Hz - Interference with vision Otherwise, resonance of body parts can result from vibrations between 1-100 Hz. LIVEWARE-ENVIRONMENT

In the early days of aviation, humans were matched to the environment, with special suits and the like. Now, technology allows the environment to be better matched to the human to provide the optimum working environment. Noise, vibration, temperature, air quality and heat all need to be carefully controlled, as do work

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Flicker occurs when light is interrupted by rotor blades or propellers. Military helicopter pilots are tested for Flicker Vertigo during selection, as the Sun flashing through them can be a real problem (turn them off in cloud). A steady light flickering at around 4-20 Hz can produce unpleasant and dangerous reactions, including nausea, vertigo, convulsions or unconsciousness, which are possibly worse when you are fatigued, frustrated, or in a 1-47

Decision Making Models

state of mild hypoxia. Flicker certainly modifies certain neuro-physiological processes; 3-30 a second appears to be a critical range, while 6-8 will diminish your depth perception (the Germans set their searchlights to flicker during World War II, to get up the nose of bomber pilots). Hangovers make you particularly susceptible. When being affected by flicker, you should turn off the strobe lights. LIVEWARE-LIVEWARE

Poor relationships or communication between crew members, outside workers and even management have led to disasters, so group dynamics are important in getting people to work together in teams. See Communication. AUTOMATION

040 03 07 01 The brain’s limitations, in terms of speed of computation and the ability to multi-task (i.e. none!) began to be recognised as early as 1959, with the Boeing 707. This was when it was realised that pilots could soon begin to exceed their design capabilities, and that the help of various black boxes was needed. Many routine tasks can be done by computers, which are just electronic machines - the man-machine system is meant to relieve pilot workload and increase time for supervision. To avoid wrong decisions, a system should at least be able to report malfunctions. But how much control should be given to black boxes? If they have too much, the cockpit becomes boring and errors can go unnoticed amongst the EASA Professional Pilot Studies

monotony (hypovigilance). Pilots can also become less confident in their basic airmanship skills. Although automation can conserve resources and attention, and generally improve the safety record, it can result in routine errors, or slips, such as when programming waypoints into the system (it can also reduce your flying competence). Machines can wait for infrequent information without getting bored, and can perform long-term control and set values, again, without getting bored, but people can exercise judgment, make better decisions and detect unusual conditions (smells, noises), while getting bored very easily. So, on the one hand, automation is good, because it can take a lot of routine work away from you, and flight management systems can operate an aircraft very fuel-efficiently. For example, a FADEC (fuel control thingy) has many monitoring functions, so the chances for human error are reduced and reliability is better. On the other hand, automation can induce a feeling of automation complacency (too much reliance on the machine) and lead you not to check things as often as you should (reduced vigilance), or push the envelope, as when using a GPS in bad weather - with much of the navigation task taken away from you, it is tempting to fly in worse weather than you can really cope with. As your visual clues decrease, your mental processes focus more on trying to see where you’re going and less on flying until 1-48

Decision Making Models

you lose control, when flying on instruments is no help because you are not mentally prepared for it.

You can avoid automation complacency by regarding systems as one more crew member that needs to be crosschecked. You can cope with low error tolerant situations (where errors could have serious consequences) by constantly complying with cross-over verification procedures (i.e. cross monitoring). A high degree of automation may alter traditional tasks so much that your attention and competence is reduced once you are out of the loop. Thus, communication and coordination call for a greater effort from the crew. The trouble is that we rely on machines so much, and their rapidity of change adds to our stress, as described by Alvin Toffler in his book, Future Shock. However, one major benefit is the integration of many sources of information and its presentation in a clear and concise manner (sometimes!), as with the glass cockpit display shown, and providing a major contribution towards situational awareness, as long as you keep a mental plot going, as the information presented can be highly filtered. EASA Professional Pilot Studies

Put more in exam language, the use of modern technology in glass cockpits facilitates feedback from the machine via more concise data for communication on the flight deck. So there. What it doesn’t help with is the fact that one knob used to have one function in older systems - now several functions may be hidden at different levels, for which there is no substitute for knowing the menu system. M ODES

Modes represent a system’s behaviours, or functions so, the more functions there are, the more modes you have, and the potential for error. However, instead of using unique displays and controls for each mode, one set can be made to perform different functions depending on the mode selected - a good example is the menu system of the average Flight Management System (FMS), discussed in Instruments. In the Display Unit shown above, the Line Select Keys, or the buttons on either side of the screen, change their functions according to the mode selected but, however good this many-to-one mapping may be, it can involve mode errors from insufficient knowledge of the system. 1-49

Decision Making Models

Mode awareness means being aware of the active modes and understanding the relevant actions and responses to use the system properly. It involves knowledge* of the configurations of an aircraft and the auto flight system modes, which include such items as current and target speed, altitude, heading, AP/FD armed/engaged modes and the state of the FMS, to name but a few.

*The role of the pilot has changed from flying to being a systems or flight-deck manager, or an outer-loop controller (a setter of high level goals), rather than an inner-loop controller (a mere manipulator of the controls).

Airbus has a low level of pilot input - the system will look after the aircraft with minimal help from the crew (which is discouraged). Boeing has a slightly greater pilot input. In order to maintain mode awareness, you must be continuously vigilant for indications from several locations within the cockpit. Mode errors are one kind of breakdown in humancomputer interaction, from word processors up. When a device does something in one way in one mode and another way in another mode, there is an increased potential for error.

Recent studies of the implementation of automation in the cockpit have suggested that after over a year of experience on type: • 55% of pilots indicated that occasionally the FMS did things that surprised them (especially VNAV!) • 20% of pilots did not understand all the modes or features available to them. • The most common questions on the flight deck are: • ‘What is it doing?’ • ‘Why did it do that?’ • ‘What will it do next?’ • ‘I wonder if it will do that again?’

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Decision Making Models

Under this heading comes cockpit design and automated systems, being associated with the human/workplace interface. Here's an illustration of how bad design can be the start of an event chain:

A relatively inexperienced RAF Phantom (F4) pilot had a complete electrics failure, as if being over the North Sea at night in winter wasn't stressful enough. For whatever reason, he needed to operate the Ram Air Turbine, but he deployed the flaps instead, as the levers were close together. Of course, doing that at 420 knots made the flaps fall off the back, and the hydraulic fluid followed. Mucking around with the generators got the lights back on, and he headed for RAF Coningsby, with no brakes. Unfortunately, on landing, the hook bounced over the top of the arrester wire, so he used full afterburner to go around in a strong crosswind, but headed towards the grass instead. The pilot and navigator both ejected, leaving the machine to accelerate through 200 knots, across the airfield at ground level.

went through a ditch, lost its undercarriage and fell to bits in a field. The Fire Section had by this time sent three (brand new) appliances after it without any hope of catching up, but they tried anyway. The first one wrote itself off in a ditch because it was going too fast, the driver of the second suddenly put the brakes on because he realised there had been an ejection and that he might run over a pilot on the runway, at which point the number three appliance smashed into the back of him. We are in a similar situation - how many times have you jumped into the cockpit of a different machine, to find the switches you need in a totally different place? This doesn't help you if you rely on previous experience to find what you need (in emergencies you tend to fall back to previous training), so the trick is to know what you need at all times, and take the time to find out where it is (read the switches).

Meanwhile, the Station Commander was giving a dinner party for the local mayor in the Mess, and the guests had just come out on the steps (near the runway), in time to watch the Phantom come past on the afterburner, with two ejections. The mayor's wife was just thanking him for the firework display as it EASA Professional Pilot Studies

LEARNING & PERFORMANCE In simple terms, learning can be defined as a long-term change in behaviour based on practice and experience, either other peoples' (reading, studying) or your own. The types of learning include:

• Level 1, which is good enough to be safe. • Level 2 includes effectiveness, such as being able to fly in your local environment by yourself. • Level 3 is efficiency. • Level 4 is precision and continuous improvement.

• Classical/Operant Conditioning, such as an experienced pilot’s reaction to a fire warning.

Left to themselves, most pilots will only ever reach Level 2 without additional training.

• Insight, or a pilot setting up on-board navigation equipment.

Factors That Af fect Learni ng

• Observational Learning/Imitation. A student pilot following the instructor, then doing it solo. © Phil Croucher Electrocution Technical Publishers 2016

According to Tony Kerr, skills come at four levels:

• Experience. Learning from our mistakes. • Skill Learning. Observational learning, along with practice, plays an important role in the learning of skills (Motor Programs). You are skilled when you: • Train or practice regularly. • Know how to manage yourself. • Know how to keep resources in reserve for the unexpected.

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People store information in long term memory best when they understand it, and can integrate it with what they already know. Learning by rote does not encode information in long term memory very strongly, as it is not as well understood, organised or integrated. In addition, it is relatively isolated, and therefore harder to recall. Meaningful learning, on the other hand, allows you to apply your knowledge to new situations because it involves understanding (transfer is the name given to the ability to use what has been learnt to solve new problems). Motor programs (see Information Processing, above) are stored routines that enable patterns of behaviour to be executed without continuous conscious control. According to Anderson, the acquisition of such expertise has three stages, namely: 1-52

• Cognitive, where you think about what is being done (Declarative Knowledge). • Associative, concerning the integration of the various aspects of the subject to be learned (Knowledge Compilation). You may slip back to this level in a non-routine situation (official language for an emergency!) Stress and lack of practice make it more likely.

• Autonomous, or Automatic (depends on which book you read). You operate with no conscious control (Procedural Knowledge).

Performance The effect of experience and habit (see Judgment) on performance can be positive or negative. Your performance is better when you are relaxed, regardless of the time of day. As far as the average influence of age on pilot performance is concerned, it has little impact when it can be compensated for with flight experience. Having said that, human performance varies according to the time of day and often according to body temperature. Poorest performance can be expected around 03:00.

In other words, you start with a theoretical knowledge of what needs to be done, move through practice, to where the knowledge is completely in memory (although I have never felt that learning the complete alphabet was necessary before learning to read). In aviation terms, in the first (or cognitive) phase, an instructor might talk about skills you will acquire, including the task, typical errors and target performance. Next comes the associative phase, where techniques are demonstrated and learned, and errors are gradually reduced. The Autonomous or Automatic stage is where you have it down pat. The quality of learning is promoted by feedback.

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Threat & Error Management

THREAT & ERROR MANAGEMENT

he assumption is that, because Threats you have a qualification, you Errors know what you are doing, but Undesired State the truth is, we are surrounded by incompetence and people make mistakes all the time. Even the simplest jobs can be rampant with them, and they are not performed by idiots, but normal, otherwise intelligent people. Take flat pack instructions - surely it’s not that hard to do it properly? If these jobs are so simple, it’s not surprising that a fair proportion of the people involved in aviation will also make mistakes, especially when they have to work under the typical pressures involved. Threat and Error Management (TEM) is a 040 01 03 new framework (largely sponsored by the University of Texas) for what used to be called Airmanship, or simply common sense. Although this could also be a definition of CRM, TEM is more concerned with particular flights than aviation in general. It is a way of flying that either minimizes risk or maximizes safety margins, allowing pilots to recognize and counter everyday problems that may result in accidents or incidents with non-technical skills (NOTECHS), based on the analysis of incidents and accidents in high capacity airlines. Defensive flying, if you like. EASA Professional Pilot Studies

Sadly, the ICAO definition means hardly anything: “The TEM framework is a conceptual model that assists in understanding, from an operational perspective, the inter-relationship between safety and human performance in dynamic and challenging operational contexts.” We could probably improve on that: “Detecting and responding to threats and errors so that the outcome does not involve further errors, threats or undesired states.” Threats are events or hazards that: • are outside the control of pilots, for which good situational awareness is one antidote. • increase the operational complexity of the flight. • need crew attention and management, which takes up resources, especially when they are already busy. Examples include the weather, other traffic, etc. Most can be anticipated, especially with experience, but how a threat is perceived is the basis of any stress experienced. The difference is that threats come at pilots, whereas errors come from pilots. Resisting threats is managing the future and resisting errors, the past. The accepted progression is that unmanaged threats can lead to errors, and to undesirable aircraft states, the severity of which can depend on whether the pilot is 1-54

Threat & Error Management

experienced or under training, as the same error can have different consequences. Undesired aircraft states are deviations from flight paths or configurations that reduce safety margins, which are considered to be the last stages before an accident or incident. In short, threats, errors and undesired aircraft states are everyday events that must be managed to maintain safety margins. As such, it offers a flexible approach to risk management.

Thus, the importance lies not in the fact that threats and errors exist, but how they are managed, as opposed to being avoided or eliminated (they are assumed to be handled sequentially). This is achieved with the nontechnical skills gained through CRM courses, assuming that the people involved are qualified for their roles. Countermeasures can be grouped into 4 main categories: • Crew—active leadership, communication, and crew participation, for an environment that encourages open communication, briefings, workload management and a crew acting together as active threat managers.

• Review—evaluation of planning, inquiry, what-if planning. Existing plans should be reviewed and modified when necessary, and crew members should be able and willing to ask questions, investigate discrepancies, & clarify any plans. You should also treat interruptions and breaks in the workflow pattern with caution, because they can change your behaviour. For example, you could miss out an entire checklist. As experience is gained, you can move through them with little mental engagement, and it is easy to assume that, because you are on item C, that item B has already been dealt with. However, once started, a jump to another checklist to deal with an emergency may mean that the one you were going to do before you were rudely interrupted gets completely forgotten. This is called prospective memory failure, and is a symptom of the fact that humans are not good remembering tasks that have been deferred for future execution. The remedy is, if you are not sure, to slow down and re-run the entire checklist.

• Planning—briefings, planning, preparation, managing anticipated and unanticipated (unexpected) threats, contingency management. • Execution—pilot monitoring, scanning, and crosschecking, workload management, automation management. EASA Professional Pilot Studies

Threat & Error Management

Threat Manage ment A threat is a situation or event that may have a negative impact on the safety of a flight, or any influence that provides an opportunity for pilot error, such as: • Environmental threats, that could include bad weather, aerodrome conditions, terrain, other traffic, ATC requirements, etc. • Organisational or operational threats, that could include pressure from management, aircraft malfunctions, maintenance errors, etc.

• Other errors, such as stress, fatigue or distractions Threats can also be expected (anticipated) or unexpected (unanticipated). Expected threats can be pre-handled, but unexpected ones need use of your skill and knowledge.

Err or Management “Knowledge and error flow from the same mental sources - only success can tell one from the other.” Ernst Mach, 1905 In other words, correct performance and systematic errors are two sides of the same coin. One working definition of human error is “where planned sequences of mental or physical activity fail to achieve intended outcomes, not attributable to chance.” Another is “the mismatch between the intention and the result of an action.” The ICAO definition is: “An action or inaction by a flight crew that leads to deviations from organisational or crew intentions or expectations”. Studies of human error rates during simple repetitive tasks have shown that errors can normally be expected on about 1 in 100 occasions. After methodical training, a rate of 1 in 1000 is realistic and pretty good. A system can be tolerant of error when the consequences will not seriously jeopardize safety. If one error is allowed to affect a whole system, the system is described as vulnerable. Given that there is usually only one correct way of performing a task, we are lucky that errors only manifest themselves in a limited number of ways, which are linked to the ability of long term memory to retrieve stored knowledge to suit the situation. This is one advantage that

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humans have over computers - namely, the ability to simplify complex informational tasks. To paraphrase James Reason, human error is neither as abundant nor as varied as its vast potential might suggest. Not only are errors much rarer than correct actions, they also tend to take a surprisingly limited number of forms. In addition, those that appear do so in a similar manner, which makes them easier to identify.

Having said that, the element of predictability in relation to errors is difficult. Errors may also be categorised as:

• Systematic, which are more consistent, and usually exist in a particular area, maybe committed by an expert marksman whose sights are not aligned. Such errors have an element of predictability, and may be corrected once the area of concern is identified. • Sporadic, and more infrequent, even occasional, and will happen whatever you do. As they don’t follow any particular pattern, they are difficult to correct. Sporadic errors are one-offs that are far removed from the rest of any related events. The accuracy of error prediction depends on the nature of the task, the mechanisms governing performance, and the nature of the people involved, so we have probabilities that certain errors will arise, rather than precision. For example, we can guess that, on January 1st, many people will use the last year when writing the date down, but not how many.

• Random, with no discernible pattern, which may be corrected through training in all relevant areas. Any accuracy here would be down to the equipment rather than the operator, like a marksman with accurate sights but a shaky hand. There is no predictability in this case.

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Errors that are inherent in the system are design errors. They occur because the system has not been thought out properly, so they should ultimately be predictable if someone gets their thinking cap on. Thus, errors don’t just arise from the human parts of the system, but can result from the system as a whole (Dekker, 2006). Latent errors, like unnoticed waypoint errors in a GPS database, have consequences that lie dormant, and are difficult to recognise (or foresee) because of the time lag between their generation and occurrence. They may also 1-57

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only be found in certain circumstances, so they can lull pilots into a false sense of security. Their consequences could be serious. Latent errors are hard to prevent, but should be made visible by a Safety Management System. Active errors, on the other hand, are committed at the human/system interface, and have immediate consequences, which is how they can be detected (for example, overspeeding the engine). They can also be corrected relatively quickly, with fewer consequences.

When looking at errors, we must also look at what is to be achieved and how it will be achieved. In other words, there is a distinction between prior intentions and intentions in action (Searle, 1980) - you can do something on the spur of the moment without intending to, as you will find by reading any court report. Indeed, the law requires that there should be intent behind the act for there to be a crime. Actions that deviate from intention either achieve the intended goal, or they do not (slips), but even intended actions can be regarded as erroneous if the plan is not adequate - errors of this kind are called mistakes. Mistakes involve a mismatch between the prior intention and the intended consequences. For slips and lapses, the problem lies with the difference between the intended actions and those that were actually executed. EASA Professional Pilot Studies

In short, a mistake is a planning failure, 040 03 02 03 and a slip or lapse is an execution failure (someone might write down the wrong GPS coordinates). That is, there is a substitution or insertion of an inappropriate action into a sequence that was otherwise good. Slips do not satisfy the operator’s intent. A lapse is an omission of one or more steps of a sequence. As mentioned previously, it is possible to miss out entire checklists. MISTAKES & VIOLATIONS

The majority of fatal crashes are not down to errors in execution (35%) or perception (23%), but in the original decision-making process (43%), because decision errors are not typically slips or lapses, but mistakes, which arise where the planned actions are incorrect. This may be the result of incorrect knowledge or diagnosis, like shutting down the wrong engine after incorrectly identifying the failed one. Whereas slips are mostly found in skill-based mode, mistakes happen more often in rule- or knowledge based modes (see The SRK Model, later). Violations are more deliberate acts, usually done for speed or convenience, however well-meaning. For example, if the takeoff path is obstacle free and you decide to take off anyway with a tailwind that is above limits, that is a violation.

Threat & Error Management

Technically, violations are deliberate deviations from rules, procedures or regulations, although unintentional ones can occur if you are unaware of them. • Routine violations eventually become normal practice. • Situational violations arise out of particular circumstances, including time pressure, workload, inadequate tools or facilities. • Optimising violations concern breaking the rules for the hell of it (couldn’t they think of a better name?)

• Exceptional violations are inevitable, when the normal rules no longer apply. Whether violations occur is down to the attitudes, beliefs, norms and culture of the company. Aside from ignoring safety rules on a particular task, they put the rest of the system in jeopardy because other people assume that the rules will be followed.

Pilots can make mistakes within five basic categories: • non-compliance, like failure to follow checklists, or official guidance, or good safety practices. • procedural errors, where you do something incorrectly, or in a different order - an example is a checklist item out of sequence. • faulty communication, such as readback errors and miscommunication with ATC. • lack of proficiency - airmanship (TEM) skills. • decision making. These errors improve with situational awareness. There are three possible error responses: • Trap - the error is detected and managed before it becomes consequential. • Exacerbate - the error is detected but action or inaction can lead to a negative outcome. • Fail to respond - the error is undetected or ignored.

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Threat & Error Management

There are therefore three possible outcomes: • Inconsequential: the error has no effect on the safe completion of the flight, or was made irrelevant by successful error management. • Undesired aircraft state: a position, condition or attitude that clearly reduces safety margins as a result of actions by the crew. • Additional Error: An error by the flight crew that now needs to be managed. Ways of allowing for better error detection include:

• Improvement of the man-machine interface. • Development of systems for checking the consistency of situations. • Compliance with crossover redundant procedures by the crew (cross monitoring).

Errors need management in order not to affect safety. They are cumulative! Officially, errors are actions or inactions that: • lead to deviations from intentions or expectations. • reduce safety margins. • increase the probability of adverse operational events on the ground and during flight. Error Management could be regarded as a countermeasure against bad decisions. New pilots naturally make mistakes - experienced pilots tend to have monitoring errors, and are more likely to think they are flying an older type. There are three lines of defence against errors: • Avoiding them in the first place (that is, not getting into a position that requires your superior skills to get out of). This needs situational awareness and, by implication, active monitoring of the situation. • If they happen, detecting and trapping errors before they are significant. • Sorting out the mess afterwards (error recovery). Error management accepts that mistakes happen, and adopts a non-punitive approach to minimise the effects (which does not mean that you should break the rules on purpose!) Evidence of this can be seen in anonymous

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reporting procedures, such as CHIRP in the UK and the Aviation Safety Action Program (ASAP) in the US.

There have also been attempts to remove the human from the system altogether (although someone still has to program the computer!) However, it is impossible to eliminate mistakes, so clearing up the mess is important. Professor James Reason, in his book, Human Error, points out that the barriers against accidents (or the sequence of human events) consists of a trajectory of opportunity originating at the higher levels of a system, passing through preconditions and unsafe acts and on to three successive layers of in-depth defence, which may include atypical conditions at any point. You could liken them to several slices of Swiss cheese, with the holes as windows of opportunity in continual flux.

Although the slices represent layers between management decision making and the incident concerned, it does not mean that all accidents stem from management! In addition, the chances of something actually happpening are quite small. On the day the holes line up, something will happen so, if you can recognise the sequence, you should, in theory, be able to pull some of the holes out of line, and prevent an accident. One Australian fire fighting pilot went to transmit, pushed the wrong button and dropped his water bucket instead. He landed, picked it up and went home for a couple of days, figuring that he must be tired and was better off out of it. Unfortunately, the chain can sometimes not be broken in time. This is from an anonymous accident report: “After twelve accident- and incident-free years flying single engine helicopters across western Canada and the U.S., I was feeling quite confident about my abilities as a pilot. I enjoyed my work, I was receiving regular compliments from customers for getting their work done safely and efficiently, and my company recognized my hard work with promotions, endorsements, cash bonuses, and pay-raises. Life was treating me well. I hadn't had a visit from the proverbial "Murphy" yet. The fire season had just started when I returned from a relaxing three-month holiday with my family. My first

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two days back to work were on a remote forest fire with a Bell 206 - a routine task in familiar territory. I had hauled firefighters and their equipment many times before, and dumped countless buckets of water on fires. I flew the allowed maximum of 8 hours on each of the first two days. At the end of each day, I flew my helicopter to the nearest company base, where I filled out my logbooks, had supper, and had a good sleep in an air-conditioned motel room. The summer was looking busy and profitable. On the third day, I went back to the same fire after having had a good breakfast and feeling well rested. It was an unusually hot day with some wind, so I was hoping for some of my favourite work on a fire-water bucketing. However, after I set 20 firefighters out to work, the fire boss had me sling in camp gear, as he expected this to be a campaign fire. I was a bit sceptical of this, as I was worried that I might be expected to stay in the rough camp. The truck driver had dumped all the camp gear at the staging area, and I had nobody to help load up the nets and roll barrels. That meant that every time I arrived at the staging point, I had to get out of the helicopter, load the nets and attach my longline. It was hot, dry, and smoky, and I was getting hungry and irritated. But I wasn't going to let the fire boss know that my frustration level was getting high, as I enjoyed the job and didn't want any complaints about me. I certainly wasn't going to allow EASA Professional Pilot Studies

another pilot - or worse, a competitor - take this dream job away from me. By the time I had all the camp gear flown in from the nearest road staging point and picked up the crews, my flight log showed I had flown 7.6 hrs just enough time remained for me to return to base. I was hungry, thirsty, hot, tired and dirty, and looked forward to a shower, dinner and an air-conditioned motel room. I informed the fire boss of my pending "time-exed" status. He said that the camp cook had seen some bears in the area, and asked me to stay at the camp for a few more hours, even though I was nearing the end of my 12-hour duty day. So, in the spirit of cooperation, I put on a brave face and helped the fire crew set up the tents. While they were eating, I carried boxes of groceries, rolled barrels of fuel, cleaned up my helicopter, and fixed a loose wire on my longline. I didn't worry about getting something to eat, because, after all, I was going back to town for a hot meal and a shower at the motel. After my 12-hour duty day had expired, the fire boss asked me to stay the night, as he was concerned about bears in the area. I made one more round trip to the staging area with him for some more fire fighting equipment and to look for the bears. Twenty-four revenue hours in three days would be a good pay cheque. When we got back to camp, the camp cook told 1-62

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me that there was nothing left for supper. As it was now getting dark and I had flown my maximum hours as well as exceeded my duty day, I had no choice but to grin and bear it. There was no hot supper, shower, or air-conditioned motel room for me that night, but I wasn't going to complain. However, no supper was just the start of the bad news, as I was then told that there was not sufficient room for me in any of the sleeping tents, but I could sleep in the supply tent. Being a resourceful pilot, I pulled out the emergency sleeping bag from the helicopter, and looked in the supply tent. Nothing but gravel and some broken boxes of dry macaroni. I didn't want to be called a whiner, so I made the best of it. I spent a cold, uncomfortable night lying on gravel with no mattress or pillow, listening to rodents eat the spilled macaroni. I was up at 3 a.m., wishing I had never taken this particular job. I was hungry, dirty, sweaty, and in desperate need of a shower and a change of clothes. Everybody else was sleeping, and I didn't want to make any noise in the kitchen tent looking for something to eat and drink, so I cleaned my helicopter some more, carried out a real thorough preflight inspection, and stood up some fuel barrels in anticipation of another busy day. At about 6 a.m., the cook was up, and I asked if I could get something to eat or at least to drink. "Get out of EASA Professional Pilot Studies

here! You (expletive) pilots think you are so important! I'll call you when breakfast is ready and not a minute sooner!" Good morning to you, too. At 7 a.m.,just as the regular firefighters were sitting down for breakfast, the local fire centre called on my handheld radio to inquire if I was available for initial attack on another fire. I checked with the fire boss, who decided to accompany me. The helicopter was full of fuel, but my stomach wasn’t. Still, getting out of that grumpy cook’s way was most appealing. We worked on the second fire for about 4 hours before another helicopter showed up to relieve me, and the fire boss and I returned to our camp low on fuel. By this time, there were 20 firefighters ready to go to work. I re-fuelled and set out the crew and their equipment in about 2 hours of flying time. The crews understood that I needed to refuel the helicopter, but I still had not had supper, breakfast, a shower, or anything to drink. Just as I was about to shut the helicopter down for some badly needed nourishment, the fire boss came running over and informed me that I had to go to the staging area to pick up a radio operator and some more supplies. OK, one more trip, and then I could get something to eat and drink. I began to give the new radio operator my standard safety briefing, but she informed me that she didn't need one. One of those types. Back at camp, a pressing 1-63

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need to deliver some lunches to the fire line meant another delay in getting some food and drink. My level of frustration was getting higher every minute. By this time, fire activity was picking up, and I was confident I could keep going. The radio operator was cluttering up our already congested radio frequency with many requests to "say again." The impatience in the voices of the firefighters echoed my frustration with her incompetence and poor attitude. Back at camp, I politely asked for a break so I could get something to eat and drink. The fire boss wasn't happy about my request, as he only had one helicopter to work with, but he accepted. In the middle of my twominute cool-down, a very excited firefighter with an irritating high-pitched voice screamed on the radio, "Help me! I'm getting burned to death!" I quickly did another hot re-fuelling, and the fire boss jumped back in. A quick reconnaissance of her area showed she was in no immediate danger, but the fire boss advised me to keep an eye on her. Then the usual requests were coming in to us by radio, "Tell Dave to turn up the pump. Bring me a strangler." "I need some water buckets over here." "Bring me some more hose." By this time, my mouth was very dry and my stomach was feeling like it was going to collapse. The possibility of fatigue and frustration getting in the way of sound judgment never crossed my mind, as I just wanted to please the customer. EASA Professional Pilot Studies

As we were circling the fire, the fire boss told me he needed me to work late that night, as he was going to require me to sling in some more groceries and camp supplies after I picked up the crews. I thought, "Marvellous. Here I go again, another day without being able to sit down for a real dinner. By the time I finish, there won't be enough daylight left to fly back to town for a good night’s sleep, so it’ll be another night in that tent. And how am I going to fudge my logbooks to avoid showing that I exceeded my flight and duty time limitations?" The next task was to move a firefighter and some hose from the top of a hill to another location. As we approached the grassy knoll, I could see the firefighter carrying the hose across a steep slope with some burned-out stumps. Not an ideal location, but picking him up there would save him walking 200 ft up the hill, and get me closer to food and drink. At this point, it seemed like my peripheral vision was getting rapidly narrower. The area was tight, and there were a lot of stumps, but nothing I recognized as being overly hazardous. I was not able to advise the firefighter of my plans because of the steady radio chatter, but as I approached, I saw him crouch down. My thoughts were, "Perfect, this guy is a pro. He can see that I am going to pick him up here, and he's making it easy for me. This will go really smoothly. I'll do a quick toe-in landing with him at my left rear door, 1-64

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and he can jump right in. What a way to impress the fire boss!"

I was hot, hungry, thirsty, and sweaty, my shirt and helmet were sticking to me like glue, and I hadn't slept for about 34 hours. Not a very glamorous situation. I informed the radio operator that we were picking up Bravo 10 at pad 7. After what seemed like an eternity on a very busy radio, I got the reply, "Roger, copy you picking up Bravo 7 at pad 10." More frustration. Just as I was about to settle the front of the skids between some stumps, I remembered that I still needed to correct the radio operator's misunderstanding. Then the high-pitched voice came over the radio again, "Hurry up! Help me! I'm getting burned to death!" The radio chatter really picked up now, as all 20 firefighters offered their advice at the same time. The fire boss, who was sitting on my left side, said, "Let's hurry and check up on her!" Fatigue, hunger, thirst, and high mental workload combined to turn me into an unthinking robot. Compulsive instinct was replacing sound decision making. As I closely monitored the position of my main rotor near a tree, and the front right skid inches from a stump, I heard the fire boss gasp on the live intercom. I looked up to see what the problem was, and the firefighter who had seemed to be making my toe-in landing so easy had just stood up and was moving up the hill with the roll of hose, just as he EASA Professional Pilot Studies

had been told to do, right under the main rotor! And I was now out of options. My brain failed to function, and it seemed like I was viewing the world in black and white. I was completely out of energy. All I could do was pull on the collective and hope I could lift the helicopter up before the unsuspecting firefighter walked into the rotor. This is the time that Murphy decided to pay his visit. My right skid hooked the stump, and even though I had been well trained to avoid pulling collective in this situation, the combination of an impending decapitation and sheer fatigue meant that this long chain of events resulted in a classic dynamic rollover. One fine helicopter destroyed, but thankfully no injuries. Looking back, I had had every opportunity to shut the flight operations down until I had something to drink and eat, or I could even have requested a relief pilot because I was very tired. It's funny how customers tolerate delays to refuel the helicopter, as they see running out of fuel as a serious hazard, but the pilot is regarded as a machine who doesn't need to sleep, eat, or drink. This account of the events leading up to a preventable accident is not an attempt to blame the firefighters. The cause was my decision to perform a tight toe-in landing among some stumps, rather than wait one or two minutes to pick the firefighter up at a much better 1-65

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location. This was a day when normal decision-making processes were affected by hunger, dehydration, accumulated stress and fatigue- factors that I have personally found to be in abundance on many job sites, but especially fires. The regulators at Transport Canada have tried to enforce rest time with complex flight and duty time regulations, but this was a situation where the pilot was severely fatigued, but well within the regulations. Now when I read accident reports in the Vortex, I imagine there were usually a lot of human factors that resulted in the accident besides just the last few seconds before the terrible sound of the rotor blades hitting the ground; customer pressures, company pressures, or worst of all, self-imposed pressures. One thing I have learned from my experience on that terrible day is that I never want to be hanging in an upside down helicopter again. Recognize that fatigue is hazardous, admit when you are tired, and break the chain of events!” Recognising an error chain will not necessarily mean that an accident will actually occur, but detecting the holes in the cheese slices lining up should be cause for concern and spark off an investigation (the purpose of a Safety Management System). However, the events in a chain may not happen one after the other, and may not even depend on each other, with months between incidents. EASA Professional Pilot Studies

The 4-7 links in the average chain means you have up to seven opportunities to stop an accident. SITUATIONAL AWARENESS

Being aware of what’s going on is your biggest weapon against errors.

A safety culture is formed from the shared beliefs, values, behaviours and attitudes of an organisation, and describes how safety is managed within it (i.e.what happens when nobody is looking!) It is relatively enduring, stable and resistant to change, and a subpart of national culture. For example, in Japanese companies, junior people must do exactly as they are told, which could lead to an accident if a pilot is ordered to fly in bad weather (by the company chairman, for example), and cannot refuse. The non-punitive approach to errors was developed to encourage people to report them. There’s no point, for example, in introducing penalties into a reporting system (so that if you report yourself, you get punished!), because no errors will be reported and the Safety Officer is the only one that looks good! Compared to the largely punitive cultures that the no-blame culture sought to replace, it was at least a step in the right direction, in recognising that most unsafe acts were just honest errors, or the kinds of mistakes that anyone can make. However, 1-66

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there are people who wilfully participate in unsafe acts or violations, for which it was not suitable. An active safety culture is vital for any Safety Management System.

According to Professor James Reason, it includes: • A Just Culture, or an atmosphere of trust in which people are encouraged (or even rewarded) for providing essential safety-related information. However, there is also a clear line between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. In essence, it is a non-punitive safety system that facilitates open communication within an organisation, that promotes a questioning attitude, is resistant to complacency, committed to excellence, and fosters both personal accountability and corporate selfregulation in safety matters. • A Reporting Culture is an organisational climate in which people are prepared to report their errors and near-misses. It may refer to “an organisation which gathers and analyses data”.

tempo operations or certain kinds of danger, often shifting from the conventional hierarchical mode to a flatter mode. • In order to have a Learning Culture, an organisation must possess the willingness and the competence to draw the right conclusions from its safety information system and the will to implement major reforms. Factors that promote a good safety culture include leadership, commitment and good examples. There are other types of culture that influence human behaviour as well: • A Punitive Culture exists where fear accounts for any decisions that are made, to avoid disciplinary action or losing a job. • Open Cultures have open channels between the workforce and management. • Closed Cultures are the opposite.

• An Informed Culture exists where those who manage and operate the system have current knowledge about the human, technical, organisational and environmental factors that determine the safety of the system as a whole. • A Flexible Culture is one in which an organisation is able to reconfigure themselves in the face of high EASA Professional Pilot Studies

This section is meant to cover pilot examination requirements - it does not constitute medical advice.

he human body is wonderful, but only up to a point. It has limitations that affect your ability to fly efficiently, as your senses don't always tell you the truth, which is why you need extensive training to fly on instruments - you have to unlearn so much. The classic example is the "leans", where you think you're performing a particular manoeuvre, but your instruments tell you otherwise. However, although the sensors in the eyes and ears are actually quite sensitive, the brain isn’t, and does not always notice their signals. Sometimes it even fills in bits by itself, according to various rules, including your expectations and past experience. Thus, at each stage in the perception process, there is the possibility of error, because we are not necessarily sensing reality. The reason why there is a white balance setting on a digital camera is because the brain interprets what is white in its own way and compensates all by itself - indoor bulbs actually glow quite red, and an overcast sky might have some blue in it, despite what you think you see. If the camera doesn’t compensate, your pictures will be tinted the wrong way. But why do you need to learn about the body? Well, parts of it are used to get the information you need to make EASA Professional Pilot Studies

decisions with and, of course, if it isn't working properly, you can't process the information or implement any action based on it. For single pilots, it must be efficient because there is nobody else to take over if you get incapacitated. Also, presumably, you want to pass your next medical!

G Toler ance Acceleration is the rate of change of speed or direction, or both. For example, getting to 60 mph in 6 seconds is an acceleration of 14 feet per second. If you pull back on the controls, your body (after Newton) wants to carry on in a straight line, but is forced upward by the seat, which feels the same as if you were being pushed into it. This extra pressure is called G, and it affects the whole body, including the blood, so the heart must change its action to keep the system running. The body can only cope with certain amounts of G-force, from the effects of acceleration that increase your weight artificially. With no acceleration, you are subject to 1G. However, we are often subject to forces beyond our limits, hence some illusions when the mind misinterprets the proper clues. G is affected by hyperventilation, hypoxia, heat, hypoglycaemia (low blood sugar), smoking and alcohol, because they all affect the action of the heart.

The types of acceleration include: • During linear acceleration (Gx), which concerns itself with forward and backward movement in terms of speed only, the somatogravic illusion can give you the impression of pitching up or climbing, making you want to push the nose down (governed by the otoliths in the ear). This is because, in level, unaccelerated flight, the only force that affects you in is weight. If you accelerate, the fluid in the inner ear flows backwards and you end up with a resultant vector that gives you the feeling of tumbling backwards. Pushing forward makes things worse because the weight vector is reduced, but you could also fly into the ground. The effect is more pronounced at night going into a black hole from a well-lit area, unfortunately confirmed by the artificial horizon, which suffers from the same effect. You get a pitch-down illusion from deceleration. The body can tolerate 45G horizontally, but if you don't wear shoulder straps, tolerance to forward deceleration reduces to below 25G, and you will jack-knife over your lapstrap with your head hitting whatever is in front of it at 12 times the speed of it coming the other way. This type of G causes EASA Professional Pilot Studies

breathing difficulties and affects the balance mechanism in the inner ear, but otherwise has slight physiological consequences. • Radial (centripetal) - about an external axis, as found when spinning. It can lead to grey-out. • Angular - about an axis through the body. • Lateral acceleration (Gy) has effects from left to right. It typically occurs when your direction changes, with an alteration in speed. • Vertical acceleration (Gz) occurs while moving up or down. The body can tolerate 25G vertically. -Gz acts upwards and increases the blood flow to the head, leading to red out, facial pain and slowing down of the heart (your lower eyelids close at -3G). Blood vessels in the eyes and face may also burst. +Gz* will drain the blood, with loss of vision, called grey out, at +3 Gz, so it will involve tunnel vision (loss of peripheral vision) above that. This could end up as black out (where you are fully conscious but cannot see) at +6 G and unconsciousness between +7 and +8 G. During substantial +G forces, the order of symptoms is: grey-out, tunnel vision, black-out and unconsciousness. Refer also to Blood Circulation, later. Increase long term + G tolerance by tightening your abdominal muscles (it helps veinous return), ducking your head (bending forward) and 1-69

performing a kind of pressure breathing. A tilt-back seat is also useful, because it provides a supine body position that keeps the heart and brain at the same level so the heart works less. *Otherwise known as Positive G. Short-term acceleration lasts for 1 second or less. Long duration acceleration lasts for more than one second.

The skeleton does not keep the body upright - it works the other way round. Muscle tone dictates how you carry yourself, and the bones inside provide support. Lumbar support provides an even pressure for the spinal discs by allowing the lower spine to curve naturally.

Body Mass Index (BMI)

This very much discredited system is supposed to relate your weight to your height, and is calculated by dividing your weight by the square of your height. If it is over 25, you are overweight, and over 30, you are obese, which could lead to heart disease and reduce your ability to cope with hypoxia, decompression sickness and G tolerance. The acceptable range is 20-25 for men and 19-24 for women.

The Cent ral Ne rvous System

Whatever your body gets up to, the processes involved must be coordinated and integrated. This is done by the Central Nervous System, with a little help from the endocrine system. Although making an approach to land might seem to be automatic, the control responses that occur as a result of input from your eyes and ears, and experience, plus the feedback required from your limbs so that you don’t over-control, are all transmitted over complex nerve cells (neurons) for processing inside the CNS, which consists of the brain and spinal cord*, though it also includes the visual and aural systems (eyes and ears), proprioceptive system (the “seat-of-the-pants”, which works off postural clues) and other senses. *Anything covered by bone. Cells communicate with a combination of electrical and chemical signals, a process in which cholesterol plays a significant part*. Chemical signals either diffuse between cells (neurotransmitters) or are disseminated in the blood (hormones) to act on more distant parts of the body. *The brain carries 25% of the body’s cholesterol. Its availability can directly limit the ability to form synapses.

Thus, if you are 1.8 m tall and weigh 68 kg, you are normal (68 divided by 3.24). EASA Professional Pilot Studies

Neurons don’t touch each other directly - if a message needs to be transmitted, a neurotransmitter (of which there are over 100 types, including serotonin) creates a connection called a synapse between them, having been triggered by an electrical signal. The chemical is destroyed after triggering a response in the next neuron. Neurites are extensions that connect with other neurons or muscles. Those that send impulses away are axons, and those that receive impulses are dendrites. Synapses are constantly being formed and broken where they meet.

Modern drugs pretend to be neurotransmitters by providing a “key” to the receptor’s “lock”.

PERIPHERAL NERVOUS SYSTEM

This consists only of nerves, and connects the Central Nervous System with the sense organs, muscles and glands, and therefore with the outside world. The PNS is divided into: • the somatic nervous system, which contains the peripheral pathways for communicating with the environment and control of skeletal muscles, and • the autonomic nervous system, which regulates vital functions over which you have no conscious control, like heartbeat and breathing (unless you're a high grade Tibetan monk, of course), or anything that is not to do with skeletal muscle. The ANS in turn consists of the: • sympathetic nervous system, which prepares you for fight-or-flight (see Stress, later) and tends to act on several organs at once. • parasympathetic nervous system, which calms you down again, one organ at a time. • enteric (intrinsic) system, which controls the gastro-intestinal process. As it contains more neurons than the spinal cord or peripheral nervous system, and has a degree of independence, it is often called the second brain, or the immune system.

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Being under the influence of fight-or-flight is like being in a powerful car in permanent high gear, which you can’t do all the time - you need rest & relaxation to allow time for the parasympathetic system to kick in, such as meditation, or a snooze in the back of the aircraft. Being in such a high state of readiness all the time produces steroids, and can lead to depression. It can actually be a problem during an emergency in a complex aircraft, where you have to force yourself to sit still and think your way through a problem.

organ, rather than being allocated specific locations (people who have head injuries don’t seem to forget halves of novels, or who their families are). Maybe each part of the brain contains enough information to reconstruct a memory, in the same way that a fragment of a hologram contains the complete image from the whole. Paul Pietsch flipped the brains of salamanders around (upside down, etc.) and found that they behaved perfectly normally whichever way round they were.

The Brain The brain is a switchboard that is constantly in touch with the 639 muscles inside the body. It can also store vast amounts of data - John van Neumann calculated that it stores around 2.8 x 1020 bits of information over the course of the average lifetime! Although the brain is only 2% of the body mass, it takes up to 20% of the volume of each heartbeat - its blood supply needs to be continuous, as it cannot store oxygen. When their temporal lobes were stimulated (behind the temples), epileptic patients could recall past episodes in vivid detail. However, when rats had various parts of their brains removed, they could remember their way round a maze, which would suggest that, although memories are stored in the brain, they are distributed around the whole EASA Professional Pilot Studies

Many of the brain’s departments merge into each other, and work closely together, but there are still three distinct areas. The “lower” level (central core) deals with basic survival, while the “higher” ones allow more complex processes. • The Central Core includes most of the brain stem, starting at the medulla where the spinal cord widens as it enters the skull. The medulla controls breathing 1-72

and some reflexes that keep you upright. Also, the nerves coming from the spinal cord cross over here, so the right side of the brain connects to the left side of the body, and vice versa. Slightly above the medulla is the cerebellum, which concerns itself with (smooth) coordination of movement, and acts as a reflex centre for the coordination of equilibrium. The thalamus consists of two eggshaped groups of nuclei. One acts as a relay station for messages, and the other regulates sleep and wakefulness. Just below that is the hypothalamus, which controls endocrine activity (through the pituitary gland) and maintains normal body functions, in terms of temperature, heart rate and blood pressure, which are disturbed under stress. For example, the body’s core temperature should be between 35-38°C. It is maintained through mechanisms such as vasorestriction (narrowing of blood vessels), sweating, shivering, or goose pimples, when hot or cold. Below 32°C, with hypothermia, the demand for oxygen will initially increase, shivering will tend to cease, then apathy will set in. With hyperthermia (too hot), getting used to a hot country can take about 14 days. Due to its role in responding to stress, the hypothalamus is also called the stress centre. EASA Professional Pilot Studies

• The Limbic System wraps itself round the Central Core and is closely connected to the hypothalamus. Part of it, the hippocampus, would appear to have something to do with short-term memory, in that, when it is missing, people can remember things that happened long ago, but not recently. The Limbic System is often called the interbrain, as it has structures that communicate with both the higher and lower brain centres. • The Cerebral Cortex is the final layer that allows the development and storage of analytical skills, verbal and written communication, emotion, memory and analytical thought. Cerebral Hemispheres are basically symmetrical, but the left and right halves are interconnected (through the corpus callosum), with women having more connections between them than men, which accounts for their ability to think of several things at once, often contradictory. Each hemisphere has four lobes. The hemispheres work in different ways, leading to two types of thinking: • Left Brain, or logical - governs language, skilled in mathematics • Right Brain - conceptual. The artist type 1-73

The left hemisphere therefore works with words, and the right hemisphere with pictures.

Although the two hemispheres work differently, they still work very much together. The brain has different reservoirs of resources, depending on whether you are in the information gathering, information processing or action phase (Wicken’s theory*). Unlike muscles, which only react to stimulation, it has several constant electrical rhythms. The dominant one consists of alpha waves, and an increase in brain activity creates beta waves which are faster, but of less voltage. These are associated with the focussing of attention and problem-solving, so they make stress arousal more possible. There are also theta waves and delta waves, the latter being slow and usually only detectable during sleep. Concussion is unconsciousness resulting from a blow to the head. *Who cares? The most important parts of the brain are the brain stem, cerebellum and cerebrum.

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The body has two types of sensor: • those that collect precise data, such as the eye’s central vision, and hands and feet, and • those that collect general information to confirm the precise data above, or to provide warnings. Generally, information picked up by a sensor is only transmitted (and used by the brain) if it is called for.

The Endocrine Syst em This system contains 14 glands, such as the pituitary or adrenal glands, which secrete hormones into the bloodstream. Like neurotransmitters, hormones are only recognised by certain types of cell, although they act over longer distances. The endocrine system has some relationship to the stress response, since it is controlled by the hypothalamus - as various areas of the hypothalamus are stimulated, the pituitary and some parts of the parasympathetic nervous system spring into action. The adrenal glands also increase the heart rate and stimulate other physical responses. There is one over each kidney. The pituitary initially secretes the hormone ACTH (adrenocorticotrophic hormone) into the bloodstream from where it ends up at the adrenal cortex, which itself wakes up to secrete cortisol and aldosterone, which more or less constitute the stress response. 1-74

In the electromagnetic spectrum, as radio waves get higher in frequency, they approach the lower reaches of visible light, which is what is detected by your eyes. Radio and light waves are of the same nature (just vibrating at different rates), so the eye can be viewed as a specialised radio receiver, or at least a frequency analyser. Subranges within the range of visible light are detected as colour, with the lowest frequency being red and the highest violet, in this order: R O Y G B I V. Their combination creates white light, and black is the absence of any radiation, so black and white are not actually “colours”. The diagram on the right shows how limited the range of visible light is against the spectrum of electromagnetic waves available. In fact, if the full spectrum were 2 yards long, visible light would occupy 1/32 of an inch.

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The nature of the atom is discussed in Electricity & Magnetism but, essentially, when an electron is knocked away from its inner orbit round the atom’s nucleus, one from a further orbit replaces it. In doing so, it has to adapt to a slower speed, giving up high frequency radiation in the process, and the more energy that is given up, the higher that frequency is. As well, the closer to the nucleus this happens, the more energy is surrendered. All electromagnetic energy is produced by the movement of electrons into holes in the inner orbits of different atoms by a kick of energy coming from outside. In the case of light, this mostly comes from the Sun. For example, shifting the orbit of an electron in a sodium atom will create a yellowish light, while steely blue comes from a mercury atom. You see objects in daylight because you are able to detect radiations from the movement of their electrons. The use of heat, as obtained with fire, or applying electricity to a filament in a light bulb, has the same effect. However, no such artificial means can enable you to see the visible spectrum in its correct proportions. Red will only appear as red when the light shining on it contains the (slower) frequencies that can agitate the electrons in atoms that are able to give off red light. A London bus, therefore, reflects only the red frequencies and fails to reflect the rest. If the light striking the bus contained no red, you would not be able to see it.

Vision is your primary (and most dependable) source of information - 70% of data enters the visual channel. It gets harder with age to distinguish moving objects; between 40 - 65, this ability diminishes by up to 50%, but this is only one limitation, and we need to examine the eye in detail to see how you overcome them all. THE EYE

The eye is a dual sensor, in terms of central and peripheral vision. The latter is imprecise, but it covers a large area, and is good for detecting movement. Central vision is more exact, and narrowly focussed. You can only read instruments with central vision.

• the choroid, which lines the sclerotic and contains tiny blood vessels. • the retina, at the back, which is the light sensitive part that detects electromagnetic waves at light frequencies, and converts them to electrical signals that are interpreted by the cerebral cortex in the brain. It is sensitive to hypoxia, as are the rods. The fluid in the eye retains its shape and keeps the sensory ligaments tight. The ciliary muscles have to work to overcome this tension, which is why your eyes get tired after a lot of focussing on near objects.

The eye is nearly round, and its rotation in its socket (and focussing) is controlled by external muscles. It has three coatings, or layers of membrane: • the sclerotic, which has a transparent area at the front called the cornea, which bends light rays the most. Behind the cornea is the lens, whose purpose is to finish the job of bending light rays inwards and focus them on the retina. Its shape is changed by the ciliary muscles surrounding it. This change of shape is accommodation, which can be affected by age or fatigue. When you are tired, accommodation is diminished, resulting in blurred images. EASA Professional Pilot Studies

The lens may be dislodged by careless rubbing of the eyes (for example when the humidity is low), an accidental knock or increased G forces. 1-76

According to EASA, the optic system consists of the cornea, the lens and vitreous humour, with three coatings called the sclera, uvea and retina.

As the cornea does not have its own blood supply, it gets its oxygen from the ambient air. Mild hypoxia and dehydration, from low humidity on the flight deck, may therefore increase the potential for cornea damage when using contact lenses. Decompression may result in bubbles forming under a contact lens. If you are cleared to use contact lenses, a pair of ordinary spectacles must be carried while exercising the privileges of your licence. Aircrew who wear spectacles must carry a spare pair during flight in any case. The lens, iris and cornea control the amount of light entering the eye through the pupil, which is the black bit inside the coloured iris. Most of the refraction needed for focussing takes place over the curved surface of the cornea, which has a fixed focus, and the final adjustments are done by the lens through accommodation (the lens performs about 25% of the whole process). Generally, vision is better with more light, but too much will produce glare (older people need twice as much light to see well than younger people do). The iris appears black because any light that does not get absorbed by the retina is usually absorbed by a layer behind it called the retinal pigment epithelium. If it wasn’t, your vision would EASA Professional Pilot Studies

be blurred by randomly scattered light. Redeye occurs when not all the light can be absorbed and some is reflected back. 70% of light is refracted by the cornea, and 30% by the lens (whose refractive power lies between 16-30D). The more your iris is open, the less depth of field* you have, so in darkness it is hard to see beyond or before the point of focus, and you may need glasses to help. *The depth of field is an area either side of the focus point in which everything is sharp. The wider the iris, the shorter this distance is, and vice versa. The retina has ten very thin layers, with nerve endings that act as light sensors (actually, neurons) which are called rods and cones, in the ninth. Their names arise from the way they are shaped, and each is more efficient than the other in different kinds of light. Cones are sensitive to day or high-intensity light and rods (scotopic visual cells) are used at night or in low-intensity light. As the periphery of the retina consists mainly of rods, peripheral vision is less precise because they only see shades of grey and vague shapes (you see colours because the vibrations they give out are strong enough to wake the cones up, and the brain mixes the colours received by them). The cones need at least the light of a half moon to function at all. The rods contain visual purple, also known as rhodopsin, which builds up over 30-45 minutes as light decreases until the approximate level of moonlight, which is when 1-77

the rods take over from the cones. As rods are sensitive to shorter wavelengths of light, in very low light, blue objects are more likely to be seen than red (neither will be in colour), which is why cockpit lighting is sometimes red because it affects the rods (used for night vision) less than white light does. Light waves from objects in the right visual field fall on the left half of each retina, for transmission to the left cerebral hemisphere, and vice versa. This is so that each side of the brain has input from both eyes at once, and that both of them work in concert. The size of the image on the retina decreases with distance, and is upside down. The optic nerve carries signals from the eye to the brain. The point where it joins the retina has no rods or cones, so there is a blind spot there. You don’t normally notice it because the brain superimposes the images from each eye. Once light falls on the retina, the visual pigment is bleached, which creates an electrical current. Once bleached, the pigment must be reactivated by a further chemical reaction called nystagmus, caused by the eye jerking to a new position, there to remain steady. The movement period (saccade) is edited out by the brain, and the multiple images are merged, so continuous vision is actually an illusion, as an after image is produced when light falls on the retina - that is, the image of what you are looking at remains there for a short period, as light has a momentum. As the eye does not need to be seeing EASA Professional Pilot Studies

constantly (and can therefore be regarded as a detector of movement), it can spend the spare time in repair and replacement of tissue. 30-40 images per second are taken in the average person, and an image takes about 1/50 of a second to register. It has also been discovered that, when we blink, the visual cortex in the brain (where what the eye sees is interpreted) closes down for that period. As it happens, if 90% of a rat’s visual cortex is removed, it can still perform quite complex tasks that require visual skills. Similarly, a cat can have up to 98% of its optic nerves severed without much effect. All this means you also see with the brain, giving a difference between seeing and perceiving. It also means that problems with vision can arise from the brain’s processing ability and not the eyes themselves. The eye's optical quality is actually very poor (you would get better results from a pinhole camera), hence the need for the brain, which can modify what you see, based on experience, and so is reliant on expectations. For example, if you were blind and could suddenly see an orange, you wouldn’t recognise what it was until you were able to feel its shape and texture which, up till now, would have been your only experience of one (the ability to see in 3D is learned). If the brain fills in the gaps wrongly, you get visual illusions. Less than 50% of what you see is actually based on information entering your eyes! The remainder is pieced together out of your expectations of what you should be seeing. 1-78

Your mind can get so accustomed to seeing a given set of words that your unconscious can edit out what is really there and make you see what you expect to see, as experienced by writers who can miss a prominent smelling pistake for ages. Pilots used to seeing a certain instrument picture can miss changes in the same way. Close your left eye and stare at the dot in the middle of the grid in the picture overleaf with your right eye. As you EASA Professional Pilot Studies

move the page back and forth along your line of vision (about 10-15 inches away), the right one will vanish because it is falling inside your blind spot (so move your head as well as your eyes when scanning). Now close your right eye and stare at the dot on the right. The one on the left will vanish as well, but all the lines on the grid will remain intact. This is because your brain is filling in with what it thinks should be there. If we are only seeing 1-79

about half of what is out there, what are we missing? How many readings on our instruments do we not see at all?

The eye/brain combination is therefore not trustworthy, as it can tinker with its world view before you become conscious of it. In fact, visual information entering the brain is modified by the temporal lobes before being passed on to the visual cortices (Pribram). The only part of the eye that sees perfectly clearly is in the centre of the retina, an area just larger than a pinhead, called the fovea centralis, where the first eight layers of the retina are missing, so the cones in it are directly exposed to light (that is, the light doesn’t have to battle through the first layers) for clearer vision at that point. It is the area of best day vision, and no night vision at all, so you are subject to two blind spots at night (see below). The eye’s ability to read alphanumeric information is limited to the foveal area. Inside it, the cones are connected singly to their own nerves. Elsewhere in the retina, one nerve may be connected to 100 receptors. The area of sharp vision is therefore very small, at 4 feet, the size of a small coin. This is why parts of the sky over 10° wide must be overlapped when scanning, using short sharp movements of about 2 seconds. The ratio of looking in- and outside should be 5:15 seconds. 5° away from the foveal axis, sharp vision reduces by a quarter, and one-twentieth when 20° away. Outside of that, vision is quite blurred - if you look at the top part of EASA Professional Pilot Studies

this page, you will not see the rest clearly without shifting your vision. Our eyes also take in lines of text in little clumps (fixations) so the fovea can deal with them properly (the eye can only focus when it is not moving). The small jumps needed for this are called saccades, and the points where the eye stops to focus on fixations are fixation points. As your eyes jump between fixation points, nonfoveal vision is generating a preview of the next words so the brain can decide where the next point will be. The average saccade and rest period lasts for a third of a second. So, the illusion of seeing large areas clearly (that is, more than two words at a time) comes from the rapidity of shifting - attempting to do this otherwise means seeing without focussing, and give you eyestrain. Sometimes your eye and brain can get out of the habit of looking at one point together. Vibrations can also cause blurred vision, from tuned resonance oscillation of the eyeballs. NIGHT VISION

There are three types of vision. Night vision involves the latter two: • Photopic, which occurs by day or in high-intensity lighting, using mostly cones, as the rods bleach out and become less effective. Objects can be detected with peripheral vision, but central vision is mostly used anyway, because that’s where the cones are. 1-80

• Mesopic, for dawn, dusk and full moonlight, using both rods and cones. Colour perception reduces as the cones start to work less well, and off-centre scanning gets the best results.

At night, with a low workload, cockpit lighting should be increased to prevent low vigilance. Picture: Operation of the Eye

• Scotopic, for low light, and where vision becomes approximately 20/200 (see below), using only the rods. As the cones don’t work at all, you also get a night blind spot, so you have to look to one side to see an object properly. The eye is slow to adapt to darkness. It takes about 30 minutes, as opposed to about 10 seconds with high levels of illumination. This is because of the need to create visual purple (rhodopsin), a process requiring Vitamin A, of which the retina contains enormous amounts - having too little could result in night blindness. The pupil gets larger, to let more light in, which also reduces the depth of field, or the range of focus of the eye. This will therefore increase focussing errors. Dark adaptation is an independent process for each eye. Night vision can be affected (through lack of oxygen) as low as 5 000 feet (1 600 m) under conditions of indifferent hypoxia (see below). In the compensatory stage, at 15 000 feet, it will degrade by as much as 25%. EASA Professional Pilot Studies

Total colour-blindness (as opposed to colour deficiency) can be a bar to the issue of a flying licence, being subtle and only detectable with specialised tests. It results from a defect in the structure of the colour-sensitive cones in the retina - normally when a single group is missing, although it does not affect acuity. The most common form is red/ green. Colour blindness is much more common in men than it is with women, but women act as carriers.

This is the ability to perceive detail - while the eyes can receive light from a wide arc, they can only focus over an area of about 10 or 15°. In fact, the eye finds it hard to resolve anything that occupies an angle of less than 1 minute of arc, so the smallest object you can see from 3600 m away (2 nm) would have to be at least 1 metre wide (after the 1 in 60 rule). You would therefore only be able to see the fuselage of a light aircraft inside 2 nm. At typical closing speeds, you would have 30 seconds to see and avoid. Power lines are beyond the resolving power of the eye, which is why they are so hard to see.

An aircraft heading towards you can disappear from sight under the same circumstances.

The field of view of each eye is about 120° left to right, and about 150° up and down. There is an overlap of 60° in the centre where binocular vision is possible.

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A high speed aircraft approaching head-on will grow the most in size very rapidly in the last moments, so it's possible for it to be hidden by a bug on the windscreen for a high proportion of its approach time. Lack of relative movement makes an object harder to detect.

You should be able to see another aircraft directly at 7 miles, or 2.5 miles if it was 45° off - at 60° it's down to half a mile! The reason why you must scan is because the eye needs to latch on to something. With an empty field of vision, your eyes will actually focus at relatively short distances, just under 1 metre ahead, and miss objects further away (empty field myopia). In other words, you effectively become short-sighted (myopic).

Clarity of vision is affected by: • light available • size and contours of objects • distance of an object from the viewer • contrast • relative motion • the clarity of the atmosphere Otherwise, visual acuity at high altitudes can be affected by anaemia, smoking, carbon monoxide and hypoxia.

Normal vision is described as 20/20, meaning that you can see at 20 feet what a normal person can see at 20 feet. If the ratio, as a fraction, is greater than 1/1, visual acuity is better than normal, so 6/4 means you can see at 6 m what a normal person can only distinguish at 4 m. On the other hand, 6/9 is poor: Normal people can detect at 9 m what you cannot see above 6 m.

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This is the process of forming 3D images from 2D information, in our case, 2 sets, from our eyes - and it’s all done in the brain, as mentioned before.

Accommodation is a (ciliary) muscular clue to distance, up to about 4 feet, from the change in curvature of the lens, which gets thicker as you focus on nearby objects.

B INOCULAR N ON -P ICTORIAL C LUES

M ONOCULAR P ICTORIAL C LUES

These rely on both eyes working together in two ways:

M ONOCULAR N ON -P ICTORIAL C LUES

• Retinal Disparity - also known as stereopsis, this is the main cue to depth perception (up to 60m), and it depends on the difference in images received by each eye - the brain fuses the two images to get a 3D result and analyses the differences between them to deduce distance. This disparity gets greater when objects are close. If you hold one index finger close to your eyes, and the other one further away but behind, the closer one will seem to shift its position more when you look at them with one eye closed at a time. This is because the angle between the eyes is greater. Stereopsis helps you judge the length of runways (up to 200 feet or so). • Convergence is another muscular clue where the eyes point more and more inward as an object gets closer and each eye sees an object from a different angle. By noticing the angle of convergence, the brain produces depth information over 6-20 feet. Speed is judged by the rate of change of the angle. The effects of convergence and accommodation (below) are relatively negligible. EASA Professional Pilot Studies

Vision is based on binocular vision at short distances, and rules of proportion and perspective (monocular clues) for objects further away (over 200 m). As the latter can be detected with one eye, they are not dependent on biological processes, except for focussing. They are most subject to illusion, including: • relative size (larger objects appear to be closer). • overlap (objects covered by others look further away). • relative height (lower objects look closer). • texture gradient (smooth surfaces look further away). • linear perspective (more convergence, more distance). • shadowing. • relative brightness (nearer objects are brighter). • motion parallax (near objects seem to move more). After Gold (1976), differential size is the dominant cue at far distances, movement parallax at intermediate ones, and stereopsis up to 17 m (more if you fixate). 1-84

Atmospheric perspective is where distant objects are less coloured and less distinct. For example, the dark shape on the left is actually a half-moon, and it is level with the other one, even though it looks like as if it is further away. Optical illusions, discussed overleaf, may occur when any of the above cues are missing.

A clearly focussed image on the retina depends on the length of the eye against the focal length of the lens, which is adjusted by variations in the thickness of the lens, as performed by the ciliary muscles.

For best results, the image should come into focus directly on the retina - there is some evidence to suggest that muscular activity at the rear can adjust the body of the eye to help the lens. Otherwise, the major causes of defective vision are: • Hypermetropia* - where the eyeball is too short, and images focus behind the retina (farsightedness). Requires a convex lens. • Myopia* - where the eyeball is too long, and images focus in front of the retina (short sight). Needs a concave lens. • Presbyopia - the lens hardens, leading to hypermetropia and difficulty in focussing, lack of accommodation (comes with old age). • Cataracts - the lens becomes opaque. • Glaucoma - increase in pressure of liquid in the eyeball interferes with accommodation for the progressive narrowing of the visual field. • Astigmatism - unequal curvature of cornea or lens. Corrected with a cylindrical lens. *Both conditions cause blurred vision, which is correctable by glasses, that vary the refraction of the light waves until they focus in the proper place.

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N IGHT M YOPIA AND N IGHT P RESBYOPIA

Also known as red light presbyopia, night presbyopia occurs in presbyopic individuals who are subjected to red light, which is found in some cockpits during night operations. Red light has the longest wavelength, so when you try to read instruments or charts in it, the demand for accommodation is more than if you were using white light, making it difficult to read small print. In effect, your depth of field is reduced.

Flying is subject to illusions, especially when carrying out extreme manoeuvres and/or at night. The input from your senses is interpreted (rightly or wrongly) by your conscious and subconscious minds. The former handles the visual aspects, and the latter all the rest, through the peripheral nervous system, part of which, if you remember, runs your body automatically. When the subconscious becomes confused about your position in space (it assumes you are on the ground), the only link between you and reality is the visual system linked to the conscious mind, which is a lot slower and less capable in its processing ability. As the eyes are not affected by acceleration, centrifugal force or gravity, you must rely on your instruments when you get disorientated.

Night myopia (nearsightedness), also known as twilight myopia, causes some people who are slightly myopic in daylight to become more so after dark.

Also known as Empty Field Myopia, this describes the short-sightedness experienced when there is nothing to look at outside the cockpit. For example, when flying VFR on top, clouds prevent you from seeing the ground, and the light they reflect reduces your visual cues. Your eyes will tend to lock-in on the instruments (i.e. less than about 1 metre ahead) and remain fixated for that distance, so when you look outside, the resulting myopia could stop you seeing other aircraft. Look at the wingtips from time to time to allow relaxation of the ciliary muscles (the ones that control the shape of the lens for near and far vision).

Much of what you “see” outside the central zone of attention (the fovea) is a reconstruction of what was there a few seconds ago, because the eyes simply do not have the bandwidth to stream 1080p video across their whole field of view. The visual cortex filters the data it gets from the rods and cones and uses it to identify objects that are inserted into a mental model of the world. Humans are prone to illusions when their mental models differ from the real world, in which case, protective measures would include comprehensive briefings and debriefings. Illusions exist when what you sense does not match reality, but they are more than just mistaken perceptions.

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They occur because our senses are limited, especially when it comes to the demands of flight - the missing bits tend to get filled in by the brain, sometimes wrongly. Even going to the cinema is an optical illusion: still frames are shown so quickly that it looks as if movement is taking place - the switching is done in the brain, using the eye’s persistence of vision, which is the ability to retain an impression of the shape, colour and brightness of an image for a fraction of a second after light from the image stops being received. Without persistence of vision, this would not work.

Looking directly at an object under water is difficult because light rays refract (bend) as they pass the surface and the object appears to be displaced:

windshield), causing a prismatic effect - like looking through a base-down prism, which tends to make objects look higher or closer. Raindrops on a windscreen can double the apparent size of lights outside and make you think you are closer. The reflections on the windshield can create a false horizon below the true one by as much as 5°, which means a difference of 200 feet at one mile. This will be more apparent with high intensity runway lighting, which may also give you the same effect that actors have on stage, where they can't see the audience through the bright lighting. The lack of normal contrast will also upset your altitude perception, making you feel further away and higher than you are. As a result, on a final approach you could find yourself too low and fast. Approaching an oil rig, particularly, the lighting will appear as a straight line above 1 nm away, an ellipse as you get closer, then a circle close to. As you have no depth perception, the closing speed is very hard to judge until you get very close, and pilots will either come to the hover just short or go steaming past and have to pitch nose-up to stop themselves overshooting.

This has obvious parallels with looking at a runway through a wet windshield and distortion occurs, especially where water is thicker near the bottom (nearer to the EASA Professional Pilot Studies

In the image on the right (a Ponzo illusion), the two horizontal lines are the same length, but they look different because your perspective cues are not correct.

On the radar screen in the picture below, the two aircraft tracks look to be safely separate, but they are not.

"An atmospheric optical phenomenon of the polar regions in which the observer appears to be engulfed in a uniformly white glow". That is, you can only see dark nearby objects - no shadows, horizon or clouds, and you lose depth perception. It can occur over unbroken snow cover beneath a uniformly overcast sky, when the light from both is about the same (you get brownout in dust clouds). Blowing snow doesn't help because you may also get a vectional illusion, and it's a particular problem if the ground is rising. Flat light is similar to whiteout, but it comes from different causes, where light is diffused through water droplets suspended in the air, particularly when clouds are low. Objects seen through fog or haze will seem to be further away. An object brighter than its surroundings (such as a well-lit runway), will appear closer so, on an approach, you might start early and be lower than you should. In haze, objects appear to be further away due to their lack of brightness. Approaching at night with no visual reference or landing aids can make you think you are higher than normal and there is a risk of landing short, or ducking under (see also the Kraft illusion, below).

One classic illusion for pilots is whiteout (see Meteorology), defined by the American Meteorological Society as: EASA Professional Pilot Studies

A good fixed wing example of an optical illusion is a wider runway tending to make you think the ground is nearer than it actually is:

pilot used to a runway 28 m wide, who lands on one 40 m wide, will think he is nearer and fly a lower and flatter approach, tending to overshoot with a high roundout.

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The best visual cues for height during the flare are your apparent speed and the texture of ground objects so, if there is no information, you should make an instrument approach and be aware of these illusions.

Ai lea rcraf din t f e g t els o lo hi w e ghe r a r, ppr oac h

A narrow runway delays your reactions, possibly leading to an undershoot. In the diagram above, all three landing strips are the same distance and angle away from the aircraft, but the one on the left is wider and shorter (looks nearer, and low on the glideslope, so you might carry out a higher approach and flare too soon) and the one on the right is longer and thinner (looks further away and high on the glideslope, so you might go lower and flare too late, landing short while trying to keep the sight picture). So, a

Ai lea rcraf din t f e g t els o h lo igh w e er r, app roa ch

Similarly, being used to a runway 45 m wide and trying to land at one 28 m wide may make you think you are higher and produce a low (flatter) approach with an undershoot, with a late flare and a tendency to land short.

The illusions you might get with sloping ground include: Problem