The Decision Making Process in Aviation

Flying is a series of events requiring you to make a continuous streams of decisions. One decision after another and the previous one influences the next one. Decisions like: We're low on fuel -> where is the nearest airport -> with the correct fuel type -> and so on.

These kind of decisions also happen throughout our whole lives, so that what we discuss here can be advantageous to other area's too.

Everyone flying an aircraft has, at one point or another in his or her flying career, has had to make decisions about fuel, weather diversion or passenger well being.

Basic pilot airmanship and plain common sense are one of the important factors and these should be emphasised upon during pilot training.

It is interesting to know and to see how the human pilot interacts with the aircraft and its surroundings. Especially when the going get tough during night flights, turbulent or bad weather and other challenges for the pilot.

The interrelating aviation events are between people (cockpit crew), aircraft, environment and all occur over time. We can divide them into 5 parts:

• Pilot - The pilot makes continuous decisions about his/her own competence and general feeling (health or fatigue).
• Aircraft - The state of the aircraft is a source of information to the pilot on which he makes decisions.
• Environment - Environment is where the pilot and the aircraft operates. Think of weather, runway, traffic etc.
• Operation - This is the interaction of the previous three items in terms of: is everything going as planned?
• Situation - Basically, situation is knowing what's going on around you and the aircraft. Thus the sum of the above four items.

The Situation is the sum of: Pilot, Aircraft, Environment and the Operation. Any situation is therefore affected by these four interrelated items. This relationship is the awareness of the pilot. The higher this is, the safer he or she is when acting as a pilot.

ADM - Aeronautical Decision Making

This process is rather complex, but can be broken down into six well known parts suited for our explanation:

• Detect - the fact that we have a change
• Estimate - the need to do something about it
• Choose - a successful outcome
• Identify - actions to control the change
• Do - the identified action
• Evaluate - effect of the action on the change

The above process DECIDE is not limited to aviation but can be applied on any situation on our lives. There are several items concerned with good decision making and safe flying. Pilot attitude, risk assessment skill, recognizing and handling stress, how to learn from and change behaviour and last but not least evaluating one's own decision making skills.

Emergencies

The DECIDE model is not very practical in case of an emergency. Decisions in emergencies must follow a shorter model with the unfortunate mnemonic DIE:

• Detect the need for an action
• Implement the response as dictated in emergency checklists
• Evaluate the outcome of that response

Now you know why practice and a good review of emergency procedures are crucial. In a real emergency you might not have the time to implement the DECIDE model. Instinctive reaction might be needed to get the situation under control. Training, training and more training on emergency procedures is necessary to counteract emergencies when needed.