Back to SA school: contrasting three approaches to situation awareness in the cockpit

Abstract

Situational awareness (SA) has received considerable attention in recent years and significant theoretical advances have been made. The advances to date can be categorised in three main schools of thought: psychological, engineering and systems ergonomics schools. We discuss the theoretical contributions of the three schools to the understanding of SA and apply these to the analysis of the McDonnell Douglas MD-80 series, as described by Hutchins (Hutchins, E., 1995a. How a cockpit remembers its speeds. Cognitive Science, 19, 265–288), descent and approach. We discuss how the different views advocated by the three schools give rise to different approaches to support SA. We argue that while the psychological and engineering approaches each give valuable insight into the phenomenon neither gives a complete explanation of SA. It is only the systems ergonomics perspective, in considering the individual, artefacts in the environment and interaction between these which offer a full explanation of the phenomenon.

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