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:

General aviation safety can be significantly improved by enhancing cognitive functions such as memory and attention through specific techniques like rehearsal, mnemonics, and maintaining focus to avoid complacency.
Managing emotional stress is crucial for pilots, as both chronic and acute stressors can severely impair judgment, decision-making, and communication, requiring self-awareness and proactive coping strategies.
The Swiss Cheese accident model illustrates that accidents often occur when multiple layers of defense fail due to aligning systemic weaknesses (latent failures) and immediate errors (active failures), emphasizing a comprehensive approach to safety.
Pilot judgment is a learnable skill that, when systematically applied using models like DECIDE and by actively counteracting hazardous attitudes, reduces accident risk, as a decision's quality is independent of its immediate outcome.

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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?