ABSTRACT
Situational awareness has become the industry buzzword describing a sense of confusion or loss pilots experience with respect to their surrounding geographical position, events, or circumstances. Achieving situational awareness is a mental process. Experience and training can afford the pilot with the opportunity to acquire good situational awareness. Another aspect of acquiring situational awareness is the ability to have good spatial orientation. The pilot must have the ability to think of the airplane in several dimensions, namely attitude, altitude, speed, heading, and time. There are a number of clues captains need to be aware of that can foretell that situational awareness is being lost. Such things as failure to meet targets, ambiguities, deviations from standard procedures, failure to remain focused on the big picture, communications failure, complacency, unresolved discrepancies, not looking out of the window, confusion and, more than anything else, a gut feeling.
