Situational awareness

Useful construct or distracting label?

Even though many professional pilots cannot define the term situational awareness, most can claim that they can ‘recognise it when they see it’, to misquote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s famous quip about pornography — or that they will recognise when it was lost, as in an accident report.

However. some heavyweight academics are quite dismissive of the term, maintaining that situational awareness is simply a name for something else less well defined. In doing this they liken situational awareness to what is termed a ‘folk model’, which allows neat but simplistic retrospective explanations of events but fails to offer any identifiable underlying reasons.