ASOG 2022 Focus Area: ASOG Article of the Month – March 2022
ASOG Author: Patrick Ryan
Pilots are not the only living organism on the flight deck affected by human frailties. “Task Fixation”—the cousin of “Task saturation”—is another common psychological concept that at best causes financial ruin and, at worst, takes many lives in aviation.
Fixation causes all cognitive capacity to focus on one task. If this task is something other than flying the aircraft or managing the big picture of the mission, then the potential for an accident or mission failure rises exponentially. Furthermore, fixation is not just a single pilot issue, but everyone on a flight crew (e.g., ASOs), as highlighted in many accident reports worldwide.
Based on many studies in the aviation safety community, the top-level fixation causes are equipment problems, abnormal situations, and task fixation.
Equipment Problems – Equipment problems range from malfunctioning gear indicator lights, mission sensors, or erroneous systems (e.g., the piss tube is frozen) as some of the things that cause crews to fixate.
Abnormal Situation – Abnormal situation is an out-of-the-ordinary event that disrupts the orderly sequence of expected events or focus. The crew often tends to focus all cognitive capacity on resolving the abnormality or non-routine event, even when there is “no” emergency, such as dealing with a non-critical piece of equipment, e.g., a personal smartphone not behaving correctly.
Task Fixation - The final primary cause of fixation is task fixation. In this case, the crew concentrates exclusively on a task that is secondary to basic aircraft control, such as navigating around terrain, resulting in the aircraft being flown into the ground, or keeping one eye out of the aircraft from multiple crew positions to avoid a mid-air collision.
To mitigate this human frailty, learn to recognize when you and your crew are getting too deep into something and not keeping up with your routine Aviate, Navigate & Communicate duties. For example, is the aircraft still flying the way it should be, are you keeping an eye on traffic, are you heading in the right direction, and are you maintaining routine communication discipline internally & externally of the aircraft.
So, if you don’t want to return home to your family or dispense with your savings, get “fixated” on “not getting fixated!”
Comments