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 …

Read more

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 …

Read more

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 …

Read more

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 Just a few years ago, we went on the record to update an outdated concept, one that had remained unchanged for decades while our industry had …

Read more

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 …

Read more

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 …

Read more

Data Entry: The 21st Century Pilot’s Essential Vocational Asset

This is the Fifth 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. This posting marks the half-way point for the year! Nearly every contemporary aviation accident (and many similar accidents in other high-risk/high-reliability industries) have a causal component …

Read more

Performance Feedback: Debriefing both the Good and the Not-so-good

This is the fourth in a series of posts that will provide, throughout the year, an improvement strategy that will cover the entire family of 9 Automation AirmanshipÒ principles. Last month we examined how we can use Breifings to connect a plan to the desired outcome. This month, looking back on that last flight leg …

Read more

A Good Briefing Connects Your Plans to the Real World

This is the third in a series of posts that will provide, throughout the year, an improvement strategy that will cover the entire family of 9 Automation AirmanshipÒ principles. This post looks at how a well-constructed plan is put into action using the first half of the second principle – Briefing – to improve today’s …

Read more