ABSTRACT
Training civil flight crews to maintain an appropriate level of situation awareness, (SA) in both normal and non-normal situations is essential to operational effectiveness and safety. Providing ways of assessing individual and team SA is therefore of paramount importance. In this paper research to develop an interactionist framework from which measures of pilot SA can be developed is reported. Five metacategories of SA were defined on the basis of applied survey research and included: ‘pilot knowledge’, ‘anticipation and understanding of future events’; ‘capacity to manage stress, effort and commitment’; ‘capacity to perceive, attend, assimilate and assess information’; and ‘overall awareness’. These metacategories were integrated into an interactionist framework described by the characteristics of the P-E fit model of stress and Neisser’s perceptual cycle. Further research is discussed to include the development of a predictive model of SA and subjective and objective methodologies to assess this concept during training.
