Situation Awareness In Aviation Systems

In the aviation domain, maintaining a high level of situation awareness is one of the most critical and challenging features of an aircrew’s job. Situation awareness (SA) can be thought of as an internalized mental model of the current state of the flight environment. This integrated picture forms the central organizing feature from which all decision making and action takes place. A vast portion of the aircrew’s job is involved in developing SA and keeping it up to date in a rapidly changing environment. Consider this excerpt demonstrating the criticality of situation awareness for the pilot and it frequent elusiveness.