Learning to Fly—The Progressive Development of Situation Awareness

Abstract

The aim of this article is to argue learning as interaction, and how processes of learning a content as constituted in interaction, can be approached analytically and theoretically. Within aviation, the concept of situation awareness (SA) is used to describe a pilot's capability of correctly perceiving and interpreting a situation, and of understanding what the implications are. We investigate how SA is constituted in interaction, through the theoretical and methodological perspective of conversation analysis. In the analysis, we focus how a student develops SA as an intrinsic part of learning how to fly an airplane.