ABSTRACT

Situational awareness is a term that arose out of the fighter pilot community to explain the outcomes of air combat training exercises. In some cases, the more experienced pilot in the more capable aircraft might unexpectedly lose an engagement. In debriefings, these events were often explained by asserting that on this specific occasion the less experienced pilot had achieved better situational awareness and used it to win (Waddell 1979). With a user community already convinced that situational awareness was a valuable concept in human-system performance, it was natural that the human factors research community would follow suit and investigate situational awareness. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, situational awareness emerged as a very active human factors research area. For example, a bibliography of situational awareness was published in 1994 that listed and reviewed 230 situational awareness citations available at that time (Vidulich et al. 1994).