TAA Ruin Your Scan

Situational awareness is critical when youre on the gauges, right? Few of us will argue that with a good EFIS its childs play to maintain that situational awareness, regardless of the quality of your scan. So far, so good.

Frank Bowlin

Friday, July 14, 2017 at 12:00 AM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

Modern EFIS and autopilot reliance can lead pilots to neglect their instrument scan, despite improving general situational awareness, as demonstrated by the author's challenging IPC experience.
Even with all flight data presented on a single Primary Flight Display (PFD), a disciplined, continuous scan of critical parameters (attitude, airspeed, heading, altitude) is essential for precise instrument flying.
To combat complacency and maintain proficiency, pilots with advanced avionics should actively hand-fly more often and deliberately practice their instrument scan, akin to techniques used with traditional "steam gauges."

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Situational awareness is critical when you’re on the gauges, right? Few of us will argue that with a good EFIS it’s child’s play to maintain that situational awareness, regardless of the quality of your scan. So far, so good.

But, situational awareness is supplemental to the primary tasks of instrument flying—maintaining course, altitude and airspeed. For that, you need to be constantly cross checking your three primary instruments. It doesn’t matter whether those three are discreet instruments each more than three inches from its closest neighbor, or whether they’re clustered together over a background of a synthetic view of the ground on your primary flight display. You’ve still gotta keep an eye on your heading, your altitude and your airspeed. Of course, including attitude in that scan will help you keep the other parameters in check.