Situational awareness.

I frequent aviation forums occasionally; sometimes to ask questions, sometimes to answer them or offer an opinion, sometimes just to lurk.

I spotted a question recently, haven’t answered it because I’m not sure I have an answer. The question was “how do you teach situational awareness?”

It’s a good question, an important one. In the circuit every decision you make needs an awareness of what traffic is around you and what it is doing. You can’t turn base if someone is in front of you. You might cut them off. Calling for a stop and go when a commercial airliner is right up your tail is not going to win you many friends.

Like most students, I struggled with this at the start. You have so much going on just trying to fly the plane that it just isn’t possible to figure out what is going on around you. Slowly though, you begin to understand fragments of what is happening. Occasionally you even manage to predict what might happen next. Over time, the pieces slowly slot into place.

A lot of it is experience, but experience itself is not enough. You have to evaluate each flight; review each tiny detail, ask yourself the following questions:

“What did I do?”

“Was it the right thing?”

“What could/should I have done?”

“What will I do next time?”

Some of this can be achieved on the ground, just by looking and listening to planes in the circuit; by driving RTH mad and asking a million and one questions. I hope he realizes how much this has helped. Gaining situational awareness has never been something than came easily to me. I’ve had to really work at it, but I’m not sure I can accurately describe how I have.

Bob told me today that I have “great situational awareness” and he’s “100% confident in my ability to know what’s going on out there.” Which is interesting because I’d say that it is an area I’m still working on. I still talk out loud; asking myself “what’s around you WMAP? What’s it doing? Where is the traffic?” I still count off the planes ahead of me in the circuit. I get told I'm number 3, I count out loud , "One, two and then me." as I spot the planes.

Maybe that’s what constitutes good situational awareness, maybe other people work just as hard at it, without me realizing . Either way I don’t know how you teach it, I just know that between them RTH and Bob are doing a pretty good job.