If you knew that today was the day an accident would occur you probably wouldn’t even bother getting out of bed. Since this is never the case and a lapse in awareness can be deadly, situational awareness (SA) is your best defense against unforeseen accidents. The following is a brief discussion of what causes loss of SA and some hints to avoid these pitfalls. From the very first flight lesson, navigation is taught as your highest priority as a pilot. Communication, sightseeing and all other tasks involved in flight are taught to be subordinate to this. Keeping awareness of your current situation and anticipating what will or could happen in the near future is a time consuming task but critical to your survival. Monitoring is critical to your survival and focus is an area where it is exceptionally easy to become distracted by a single input and lose awareness of your surroundings. Unfortunately, humans have limits to how much we can see and hear at the same time. If we had to put our monitoring goal into one rule, it would be: Be aware of what you need to and ignore everything else. That's very easy to say and probably impossible to do. While it may sometime become necessary to tune out distractions and devote your attention to a single event, you must never concentrate solely on one thing and ignore everything else for long. Focus on a broad region -- keep the big picture Focus on a narrow region -- pay attention to detail Focus on the right information -- don't get sidetracked or distracted Once you are properly focused you must properly evaluate what your senses are telling you. Comprehension is key to evaluation, once you interpret and comprehend what is happening you must assess the importance of all inputs and prioritize them accordingly. Once you accomplish this you now are aware of your current situation. Anticipation is key to maintaining situational awareness for future projection. You must use al...
