Training aircrews to recover from human error: a proposal for a training outline

In aviation the crew´s decision behavior is critical. General acceptance that undesired behavior (human error) is inevitable in the end has led to the acknowledgement that safety could be enhanced when a recovery from undesired behavior can be realized. The current training programs do not satisfy for this purpose due to the danger of negative training. This paper proposes an outline for a training that assists the crew to recognize undesired behavior and to establish a recovery from it. For the outline the concept of maintaining sensing influence (MSI) is used. It assumes that whatever a pilot does, he is continually guided by the critical variable MSI. According to the MSI concept undesired behavior implies that the pilot shifted context to maintain his SI, while the instructor did not take account of the context shift. Undesired behavior is not an objective fact, it is a value of the instructor implying that the instructor and pilot do not share the same context. Having identified the switch in context, MSI becomes a criterion by which the instructor can understand the pilot´s undesired behavior and assist the pilot to recover desired behavior