ASOG Focus Area | Training & Education
Source | ASOG Training Center
Humans navigate the world through five core senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. These senses form the basis of how we experience and interpret our surroundings—from the mundane to the extraordinary. But when you lift off the runway and strap into the mission position of an airborne surveillance platform, the nature of perception changes.
For an Airborne Sensor Operator (ASO), senses are no longer biological—they become technological, intentional, and sharpened by training.
Sight, for instance, no longer belongs solely to the eye. An ASO’s vision is amplified through electro-optical systems, infrared sensors, and synthetic aperture radar. They don’t just see across great distances—they see through haze, across night, through foliage, and into the thermal signature of a landscape. Their vision is layered: thermal overlay, GPS correlation, datalink feeds, and real-time mapping all blend into a single field of awareness. It’s not seeing more—it’s seeing meaning.
Hearing takes on a multidimensional form. In place of simple acoustic awareness, ASOs process overlapping channels: aircraft comms, mission updates, pilot briefings, even encrypted data feeds. Where most people can focus on a single conversation, a seasoned operator learns to filter signal from noise—sifting critical information from background chatter, catching call signs and sensor prompts while coordinating seamlessly with the flight crew.
Touch becomes the dialogue between human and machine. It’s in the control stick that slews a turret precisely onto target, the tactile layout of hotkeys for quick reference, and the intuitive muscle memory developed from hundreds of hours on mission. Where a surgeon develops sensitivity through a scalpel, an ASO channels finesse into how they capture, lock, and track data—every motion calibrated to purpose.
The sense of smell may not find obvious use inside a high-altitude aircraft (outside smoke and fumes problem), but that doesn’t mean awareness is absent. Experienced operators develop what could be called a “mission scent,” i.e., this idea stinks, i.e., a gut-level intuition for when something’s off. It's a pattern recognition that grows with exposure: a flicker in the feed that doesn’t match the terrain, a delay in metadata that hints at system lag, a behavioral anomaly on-screen that foreshadows action. This isn't smell, exactly—but it's just as primal.
And then there’s taste—the ability to discern, to choose wisely. For the ASO, this translates into judgment. Knowing when a contact matters and when it doesn’t. Recognizing the difference between background motion and mission-essential movement. Exercising restraint when required, and precision when it counts. This “taste” emerges from training, yes, but also from mentorship, from mistakes learned and instincts earned.
Perhaps, above all, the airborne sensor operator cultivates a sixth sense: decision-making under pressure. It’s the unteachable awareness that lives between systems—the mental map of risk, timing, and consequence. It’s what turns a technician into a teammate, and a crewmember into a mission leader.
In the sky, the body may sit still—but the senses are fully airborne.
Comments
Very interesting perspective. Of the 5 human senses, only two mimic the other onboard EM sensors. Human taste, smell and touch have (not yet...?) found an equivalent airborne electronic sensor... Is industry listening?