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:

Improving cognitive functions like memory and attention through methods such as rehearsal, mnemonics, chunking, and structured tools (e.g., checklists, shorthand) is crucial for enhanced aviation safety.
Managing emotional stress, both chronic and acute, is vital as it significantly impairs pilot performance, decision-making, and communication, requiring active self-assessment and mitigation strategies.
Good pilot judgment is a learnable skill, reinforced by systematic training (like the DECIDE model) and recognizing/counteracting hazardous attitudes, and is essential for preventing accidents, which often result from multiple latent and active failures aligning (Swiss Cheese Model).

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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?