Situation Awareness - Case Study Example

Situation awareness is even more critical, yet more difficult for military pilots because apart from the normal hazards of flight and navigation, they must also be aware of friendly and enemy aircraft; as a result, they are required to be conversant with and aware of a greater number of elements in their surrounding environment. As Endsley (1999) points out, pilots are not only required to know how to operate the aircraft and the proper procedures and rules for flight, they must also have an accurate and up-to-date picture of the surrounding environment.

The research article by Banbury et al (2007) deals with situation awareness specifically from the perspective of how training can be a tool to reduce the incidence of mishaps caused by problems with situation awareness. The objective of this study was to examine whether the safety and efficiency of flight operations could be improved through training in situation awareness using a high fidelity simulator environment. . On the basis of the literature review, the second stage examined incident and accident reports to determine the extent to which situation awareness was contributing to mishaps.

During the third phase, the SA skills were decomposed into their underlying competencies, such as knowledge, skills and attitudes which were set aside as potential candidates for training. During the fourth and final stage of the project, a specialized training solution was developed around these concepts, the objective being to examine the effectiveness of the ESSAI program. The relevant factors in the SA questionnaire have been set out clearly, and they also identify the existing lacunae in the research, i.

e, existing measures of situation awareness focus on measuring it in terms of "product" (participant awareness) rather than "process", or the processes involved in situation awareness that produce a representation in memory. This identified the need for an effective diagnostic measure, and the study carried out an exhaustive search using laboratory and field based sources. The study also shows effective testing for bias, because a pilot questionnaire was administered. The article therefore builds upon the research findings from other people and carried it further.

The ESSAI program was evaluated using simulator training sessions and the Simulation Awareness Rating technique, a subjective assessment measure that is used to assess operator knowledge in three areas: demands being made on attentional resources, the supply of those resources and an understanding of the situation. The choice of the rating tool was also a good one - the Factors Affecting Situation Awareness scale, containing five sub-scales, was used to measure how susceptible the