Monday, September 28, 2009

Situational Awareness requires some thinking

Today in Human Factors class, we further discussed Tony Kerns Airmanship model. How discipline, skill and proficiency are the foundation of good airmanship. Along with the pillars of knowledge of our self, our team, our aircraft, our environment and the risks involved create situational awareness for ourselves and therefore gives us good judgment and decision making.

When talking about situational awareness, it was discussed that the definition of SA is
the accurate perception of what is going on with you, your aircraft, and your surrounding in the past and in the future.
Situational awareness is where the understanding of what has happened, what is happening and what might happen overlap.

Now with the video attached below which I've seen awhile ago...it kind of ties into this kind of thinking and how we can keep situational awareness.

Since situational awareness involves thinking of the past, present, and the possible future, I could say that we have to be thinking in the 5th or even 6th dimension in order to keep situational awareness.




4th dimension is time and thinking in this dimension allows us to see things as a line. What has happened and what is happening is connected by the series of decisions, luck/fate, and actions of others.

5th dimension takes this further and says that thinking in this dimension is almost projecting ahead to the possibility of different options in the future. It is in a way some form or step of a decision making process. If we see or think in the 5th dimension which is a split, it allows us to choose the best possible outcome that we want.

However thinking in the 6th dimension is possibly the best way to maintain situational awareness as it allows us to continually assess the past, present and our intended future/outcome. For example, we get ourselves into a situation we don't necessarily like and want to turn the situation into a more suitable one. We can think in the 6th dimension, a fold, and see what our actions, decisions in the past could have been in order to project into the desired outcome that we want to happen now. After that, we can see where we actually are and where that desired outcome is, and how it connect and how we can move ourselves from here to there.

I got confused after the 6th dimension but I can still show the second part of the video.

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