Flight Safety Essays - Attention, Human Behavior, Cognition

Flight Safety If you knew that today was the day an accident would occur you probably wouldnt even bother getting out of bed. Since this is never the case and a lapse in awareness can be deadly, situational awareness (SA) is your best defense against unforeseen accidents. The following is a brief discussion of what causes loss of SA and some hints to avoid these pitfalls. From the very first flight lesson, navigation is taught as your highest priority as a pilot. Communication, sightseeing and all other tasks involved in flight are taught to be subordinate to this. Keeping awareness of your current situation and anticipating what will or could happen in the near future is a time consuming task but critical to your survival. Monitoring is critical to your survival and focus is an area where it is exceptionally easy to become distracted by a single input and lose awareness of your surroundings. Unfortunately, humans have limits to how much we can see and hear at the same time. If we had to put our monitoring goal into one rule, it would be: Be aware of what you need to and ignore everything else. That's very easy to say and probably impossible to do. While it may sometime become necessary to tune out distractions and devote your attention to a single event, you must never concentrate solely on one thing and ignore everything else for long. ? Focus on a broad region -- keep the big picture ? Focus on a narrow region -- pay attention to detail ? Focus on the right information -- don't get sidetracked or distracted Once you are properly focused you must properly evaluate what your senses are telling you. Comprehension is key to evaluation, once you interpret and comprehend what is happening you must assess the importance of all inputs and prioritize them accordingly. Once you accomplish this you now are aware of your current situation. Anticipation is key to maintaining situational awareness for future projection. You must use all information available and project multiple eventualities to prepare for any events that may occur in the future. Normally this is a fairly simple predictable process and is a lifesaver in tasking situations. You must consider future contingencies as well and these may save your life. Events such as emergencies, equipment failures, and unplanned maneuvers by other aircraft are examples of useful projections. Thinking through the 'what', 'where', 'when', and 'who' of a potential unexpected occurrence may be just enough prior planning to make the difference between success and failure. Finally have a plan. All of the SA and future projections in the world are useless unless you consider alternatives in advance and at least mentally implement them to judge their effectiveness. No matter how much you focus, evaluate and, plan many other variable will compete for your attention. Here are some traps that may try to steal your SA and ways to avoid them. Focus on the right Information at the right time. A lapse in judgment can occur at any time to anyone. Keep your priorities straight. If flying watch your altimeter lest the ground come up and smite thee. If on the ground, pay attention to street signs and right of way indicators. If something doesnt feel right it probably isnt. The human senses though limited, present you with enormous amounts of information. After through observation and planning you may think everything is going well but cant shake the nagging feeling something is out of place, listen! It may mean the difference between life and death. Missing an approach or being late for dinner is a small price to pay for ensuring you and passengers eventually arrive safely at the intended destination. Be wary of both task saturation and boredom. Studies show that boredom is at least as likely to cause lapses in judgment as task saturation if not more so. Human nature is such that unchallenging situations quickly invoke boredom and a loss of focus. Always realize this and ensure you are vigilant. Habits can be good and bad. Training is a major part of a pilots daily routine. Some tasks or performance levels may actually increase likelihood of error in an emergency or other task

Frederick Douglass Essays (1183 words) - Slave Narratives

Frederick Douglass Essays (1183 words) - Slave Narratives Frederick Douglass Frederick Douglass was an emancipated slave who passed from one master to another until he finally found the satisfaction of being his own; he went through almost as many names as masters. His mother's family name, traceable at least as far back as 1701 (FD, 5) was Bailey, the name he bore until his flight to freedom in 1838. His father may or may not have been a white man named Anthony, but Douglass never firmly validated or rejected this possibility. During transit to New York (where he became a freedman) his name became Stanley, and upon arrival he changed it again to Johnson. In New Bedford, where there were too many Johnson's, he found it necessary to change it once more, and his final choice was Douglass, taken, as suggested to him by a white friend and benefactor, from a story by Sir Walter Scott (although the character in that story bore only a single 's' in his name). All throughout, he clung to Frederick, to 'preserve a sense of my identity' (Norton, 1988). This succession of names is illustrative of the transformation undergone by one returning from the world of the dead, which in a sense is what the move from oppression to liberty is. Frederick Douglass not only underwent a transformation but, being intelligent and endowed with the gift of Voice, he brought back with him a sharp perspective on the blights of racism and slavery. Dropped into America during the heat of reform as he was, his appearance on the scene of debate, upon his own self-emancipation, was a valuable blessing for the abolitionists. In their struggles so far, there had been many skilled arguers but few who could so convincingly portray the evils of slavery, an act which seemed to demand little short of firsthand experience, but which also required a clear understanding of it. Douglass had both, and proved himself an incredibly powerful weapon for reform. While the identity of his father is uncertain, it is generally accepted that the man was white, giving Douglass a mixed ancestry. Mirroring this, he was also blessed with an eye that could bring into focus different perspectives and, just as many multi-racial children today are able to speak multiple languages with ease, he had the ability to translate in the most eloquent fashion between the worlds of the black man and white man. Thus, ironically, the torturous beginning of Douglass' existence was inadvertently made (by him) into a treasure for 'us' (being mainly white America). The story of the American Dream, wherein a young man, born into a hostile world, never loses sight of one goal, is not all that distant in theme from Narrative of The Life of Frederick Douglass. The story of the American Dream has been embedded deeply in our (American) culture from the beginning. Similarly anchored in the American consciousness is the presence of a 'slavery-complex'. Along these lines Douglass' role is a major one, for relatively few first-hand accounts of slavery as powerful and representative as his exist, in light of the magnitude of the crime, and few voices have been as far-reaching. More recent heirs of this 'office' such as Malcolm X have carried the torch further, just as America's racial sickness still clings to our collective consciousness. Frederick Douglass has been described as 'bicultural'. In other words, he occupied a middleground shared by blacks and whites alike. This designation proves to be thematically consistent with his biological (if we are to take his word for it) as well as psychological characteristics. Dual-natured in this fashion, he is made accountable for both sides. This can be seen in his gravitation towards freedom when he was a slave, and manifests itself just as strongly in his vision, once he was able to look back, of the 'graveyard of the mind' that American slavery was for him as it was for the rest of black America. "They would sometimes sing the most pathetic sentiment in the most rapturous tone, and the most rapturous sentiment in the most pathetic tone...they would sing, as a chorus...words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves. I have