Crew resilience relies on the Pilot Monitoring (PM) detecting and announcing errors made by the Pilot Flying (PF). As PFs become deeply focused on flying the aircraft, they tend to narrow the scope their situational awareness (SA) to their immediate tasks. Unburdened with the challenges of managing/flying the aircraft, PMs can expand the range of their SA and more easily detect undesirable trends. As long as PMs fulfill this role, very few consequential errors slip through unnoticed. Unfortunately, when PMs become task overloaded, they tend to align their perspective with the PF’s. This alignment creates blind spots within the CRM environment. From Master Airline Pilot – pages 392-393:
20.3 STAYING OUT OF SYNCH
There is a natural tendency, especially when we are under high workload and stress, for both pilots to align their perspectives. While this does concentrate everyone’s attention on solving the problem, it weakens our team effectiveness. When analyzing mishaps, we often question, “How could both pilots have missed something so glaringly wrong?”
Perhaps we have observed this effect from the jumpseat or while observing a simulator training event. The PF struggled to manage a difficult problem, so the PM pitched in to help. Since this is a desirable and expected crew response, it initially looked right. Before long, however, the PM became so deeply involved with helping
the PF that they lost their separate perspective. Deeply focused on managing the event, neither pilot noticed that an additional problem remained undetected and unresolved. Consider the example of an engine failure in the simulator. Both pilots can become so focused on managing the engine failure, attempting a restart, and preparing for an engine-out landing that they both fail to notice that the fuel load has become unbalanced.
20.3.1 Becoming Enmeshed with the Problem
As we encounter an aviation challenge, we strive to understand and solve it. We focus our attention on it. As PMs, we are pilots, too. Our natural and familiar inclination is to adopt the same problem-fixing perspective as the PF. Instead of remaining detached, we empathize with their struggle and try to help. To be helpful, we need to understand the problem. As we both work to understand the problem, we align our mindsets. Pushed to the extreme, we essentially become non-flying PFs – mentally flying the aircraft as our PFs fly the aircraft. When this happens, our error detection and mitigation roles fade away. We become enmeshed with the problem and lose some of our ability to accurately observe it or recognize it. As soon as we synchronize our mindsets, we begin looking for the same things, seeing those same things, not looking for other things, missing those other things, both making the same errors, and both missing that we have made those same errors. Our separate error detection and mitigation roles are lost. As our attention is drawn into the problem, we can become blinded to worsening conditions and counterfactuals. In some ways, as we become surrounded by the problem, we lose our ability to accurately observe it or recognize it.
20.3.2 Maintaining a Detached Perspective
To function as effective PMs, we do need to understand the PF’s mindset. So, there will always be some alignment. We just need to remain aware enough and detached enough to continue fulfilling our PM role. Qualitatively assessing what the Captain is doing requires a detached perspective. This detachment allows us to judge the accuracy and appropriateness of their actions and choices. We ensure that the path is managed correctly and that the projected path remains appropriate for the conditions. We can only comprehend this bigger picture by mentally stepping back from the actual flying. We see this in the different ways that each pilot builds their SA. PFs focus on immediate flying tasks which keep them centered on present moment SA. As they become task-saturated, they lack the time to look ahead and build future SA. By assessing the wider perspective, PMs focus on building future SA. This allows us to intentionally scan for counterfactuals and signs that the game plan may be failing.
Performing PM duties is not a natural pilot skill. We chose to pursue aviation careers because we enjoy flying aircraft (being the PF). We did not choose this career to watch other people fly aircraft. With the exception of check pilots and flight evaluators who are tasked to rate the accuracy and quality of a pilot’s flying, few of us naturally prefer the PM role. When we were flight instructors, we monitored our student’s performance and judged when to intervene and take over flying. Since our students lacked experience, this made intervention logical and supported. As junior FOs flying with highly experienced Captains, intervention becomes much more difficult. Intervention events also become extremely rare during line flying, so we lack events to actively practice. That is why our procedures stress early error detection, making required callouts, and identifying unfavorable trends as vital PM skills/tasks.
In James Reason’s “Swiss Cheese” model, I divide the final layer of “frontline operators” into three separate layers – the PF, the PM, and the crew (Master Airline Pilot – page 14). The PF is typically the first person to detect and correct a failing trajectory. For the few remaining trajectories that the PF may miss, the PM needs to effectively detect and intervene. I include a final layer of “the crew” to account for CRM benefits that reduce latent vulnerabilities from either the PF or PM. While not as active a layer as the PF or PM, the “crew” layer works to improve team effectiveness by shrinking the size of our vulnerability holes.
This is why it is so important that the PF and PM layers remain different. We cannot allow both layers to have matching holes in their cheese slices. Ensuring that they stay out of synch is a PM responsibility – regardless of their experience level or social psychology with the other pilot. By preserving a separate perspective, PMs catch emerging vulnerabilities and interdict unfavorable trends.
This means that we each need to develop self-awareness with how we react to task saturation. If we discover that we tend to align with our PFs when we become overloaded, we need to develop personal detection triggers that notice when this is happening and a process to snap back to the desired PM role. This learning and reacting process is different with each individual. It is not specifically addressed in most training syllabi. It is part of a Master Class skillset that we each much develop on our own.
