Pilot decision making
Pilot decision-making is applied in almost every stage of the flight as it considers weather, air spaces, airport conditions, estimated time of arrival and so forth.
Airline industries are motivated to create decision-making procedures supplemented by crew resource management (CRM) to advance air safety.
This cyclic model allows the pilot to make a critical decision and follow up with a series of events to produce the best possible resolution.
[14] T-DODAR is used by British Airways, who added the initial T to remind pilots to consider time available before starting the decision-making process.
[10][14][24] Advantages of these techniques include that they force the crew to name the facts; they prevent jumping to conclusions; they give co-pilots a means to make their voice heard; they allow both pilots to participate in the decision-making process; and they enable the captain to withdraw an incorrect decision without losing leadership authority.
Disadvantages include that they can be an obstacle to quick and obvious actions;[10] they are used as a tool for justification rather than decision; that they don't provide a way to communicate non-communicable knowledge such as intuitions and "gut feelings".
The maneuvering process to approach and landing combined only accounts for 17% of the average flight time but is responsible for 70.2% of total aviation accidents.
[33] Statistics prove a significantly larger number of accident occurrences during the phases where pilots are in stressed and pressured situations.
Automation such as GPS, traffic alert, and autopilot, has been incorporated into aviation and has become one of the prime resources for critical decision making.
Referenced from Human-Computer Studies, an experiment was conducted to measure the effects of automation bias on decision making.
[34] Automation bias can lead to critical errors in pilot decision making, as it is one of the many difficulties in today's digital age.
It is important to compare the marginal benefit of pressing on into deteriorating weather to the risk associated with the flight to make the correct decision.
Pilots are pressured to make a decision when canceling the flight, which could lead to a loss in reputation and revenue for the companies.
It is important that if any of these conditions are absent, a defensive avoidance or hyper vigilance becomes prevalent and aggravates the decision making process.
