Human Factors

About 30 minutes into these touch and goes, one requested a stop and go. I could not have five aircraft doing touch and goes with one doing a stop and go; it would mess up the pattern and Id be making student pilots do a lot they didnt need to. So, I come back with, Unable. I have five of yall. He came back with, Well we need to do stop and goes for training. I thought about putting that one airplane on the other runway, but I had started to have a line of departures and arrivals. Unable, I repeated. I thought the matter was closed, as it should have been.

Fred Simonds

Tuesday, March 19, 2019 at 12:00 AM ET

Verified

Key Takeaways:

Pilots can significantly enhance aviation safety by improving cognitive functions like memory, attention, and problem-solving through techniques such as rehearsal, chunking, and avoiding complacency.
Effective management of both acute and chronic emotional stress is critical, as stress can severely impair pilot judgment, decision-making, and communication in flight.
Accidents are often a result of multiple aligned systemic weaknesses (Swiss Cheese Model) and poor pilot judgment, a learnable skill that can be improved through systematic training, applying decision models like DECIDE, and actively combating hazardous attitudes.

See a mistake? Contact us.

According to the NTSB, in 2017, 94 percent of all aviation fatalities, 330 lives, were lost in general aviation.

One factor in these accidents is a lack of cognition. Cognition is “the mental process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses.” It includes processes such as knowledge, attention, short- and long-term memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and computation, problem-solving and decision making, comprehension and language. We use all these cognitive functions in flying. Is it possible to improve them and so fly more safely?