FAA Airline Transport Pilot (ATM)Human Factors and CRMMedium
A captain becomes fixated on troubleshooting a landing gear indication problem and fails to notice the aircraft has descended 500 feet below its assigned altitude. This is best described as a loss of:
- ACrew resource management
- BAeronautical decision-making
- CSituational awareness
- DRisk management
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: C. Situational awareness
Situational awareness is the perception of environmental elements and events, comprehension of their meaning, and projection of their status in the near future. Fixating on one problem to the exclusion of monitoring flight parameters, known as attentional tunneling, represents a classic loss of situational awareness.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Crew resource management is the broader discipline of using all available resources; this specific failure is a component issue within CRM, not the overall term.
- B. Aeronautical decision-making refers to the overall process of making judgments in flight, which is broader than this specific attentional failure.
- D. Risk management involves identifying and mitigating hazards proactively, not the immediate perceptual failure described.
Situational Awareness (SA)
The accurate perception and understanding of all factors and conditions within a defined area that affect the safety of a flight, including projection of future status.
- Three levels: perception, comprehension, and projection
- Attentional tunneling/fixation is a common cause of SA loss
- Monitoring and cross-checking help maintain SA
- Loss of SA is a contributing factor in many controlled-flight-into-terrain accidents
Memory trick: Perceive, comprehend, project — lose one and you lose the big picture