Blog

What Does Modern Airmanship Actually Mean?

Talking about airmanship in the second decade of the 21st century can open a whole lot of issues that in the last century were largely absent from the discussion. I’ve been studying the dynamic of the human-machine interface in earnest since 2001, the year I transitioned to my first fully-integrated, glass-cockpit airplane. By that time, …

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Do You Know Enough About the Airplane You Fly?

It’s never been an interest of ours to “pile-on” during the days, weeks, and months following an aviation accident. Our approach is to evaluate the facts and findings, and then view them through the lens of contemporary airmanship. In fact, our book (Automation Airmanship, McGraw-Hill Education, 2012) was written during the aftermath of the Air …

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Truly Good Briefings

Briefing and Debriefing—the Second Principle of Automation Airmanship®—may be the most undervalued influence in today’s modern cockpit. This blog post looks at how pilots at any level of experience can significantly improve outcomes by re-examining this often overlooked and all too frequently overdone airmanship tool. Any cockpit crewmember with even just a few hundred hours …

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Positive Flightpath Control

This is the Tenth in a series of posts that will provide an improvement strategy that covers the entire family of 9 Automation Airmanship® principles. Following this post, there will be one more to close out this series which began just over one year ago, in January 2017. If you have not been able to …

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Workload Management

This is the Ninth in a series of posts that will provide an improvement strategy that covers the entire family of 9 Automation Airmanship® principles. There’s been a lot written lately about the rapid turnover of the workforce throughout the entire global aviation industry—not a week goes by without some major trade publication making the …

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Situation and Mode Awareness: SMA

This is the Eigth in a series of posts that will provide, throughout the year, an improvement strategy that will cover the entire family of 9 Automation Airmanship® principles. Just a few years ago, we went on the record to update an outdated concept, one that had remained unchanged for decades while our industry had …

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Adept Multi-tasker, or Serial Processor: Which One are You?

This is the Seventh in a series of posts that will provide, throughout the year, an improvement strategy that will cover the entire family of 9 Automation Airmanship® principles. Sixty-Nine Million. That’s the number of results that the search engine on my computer generated when I typed in the term “monitoring accidents” just a few …

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Communicating Intent

This is the Sixth in a series of posts that will provide, throughout the year, an improvement strategy that will cover the entire family of 9 Automation Airmanship® principles. Good, effective communication is a constant across high-performance teams in any domain. In Automation Airmanship, we apply this truth to working directly with fellow crewmembers, the …

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