Quote from Lea Gabriella in an interview on fighterSweep.com Original photo of an F/A-18 Hornet landing aboard the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75) in 2010 is U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Kilho Park: ref 100629-N-6003P-195.
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Lost SA?
What to do when you lose situational awareness. (And we’ve all been there!) Adapted from BAE Systems paper Airmanship Training For Modern Aircrew, presented at the RTO HFM Symposium on ‘Advanced Technologies for Military Training’, held Genoa, Italy 13 – 15 October 2003, and published in RTO-MP-HFM-101.
Meditating Military Helicopter Pilots
A peer-reviewed scientific study published this year shows the positive impact of meditation on personnel in two Norwegian Air Force helicopter squadrons. This was not new-age wishful thinking, or sloppy science self-reporting that some people felt good. No, this was university and Air Force doctors and scientists taking chemical measurements of salivary cortisol, testing performance on computer-based cognitive tasks, and comparing the …
Do ‘Brain-Training’ Games Make You a Better Pilot?
The Association for Psychological Science recently published a massive 200-page research report on brain training programs, seeing if fun cognitive tasks or games can enhance performance on other tasks. Peer-reviewed, respected authors, fully-referenced. It covered all the valid studies that have examined this question, a huge research database. And the results? Based on this examination, we find extensive evidence that brain-training …
Anne McClain on Facing Fears
Anne McClain has faced down many fears, and is now going to be rewarded with sights that are literally out of this world. She’s been an Army combat helicopter pilot who deployed to Iraq, an instructor pilot and a test pilot. She is currently a NASA astronaut, in the pipeline to fly to Mars. Quote is from an interview …
Mikaela Shiffrin on Winning Formula
“I still don’t think there is a winning formula. It’s really just working your butt off.” Mikaela Shiffrin She is the youngest slalom champion in Olympic alpine skiing history. She is also the current world champion in slalom. There is no magic formula for success. The winning formula involves hard work. And sounds a lot like the seven P’s: Proper Prior …
Brain Simulator
Simulators cost millions of dollars. But all of us can use our ‘brain simulators’ to become better pilots. Mélanie Astles is a five time French Aerobatic Champion and now is the first woman to compete in the Red Bull Air Races. Quote comes from an article in espnW.com by Tony Rehagen: For pilot Melanie Astles, to air is divine (15 October 2016).
Why Would a Ship Sail into a Hurricane?
This time last year the American ship SS El Faro went down in a hurricane with the loss of all thirty-three crew (Wikipedia page). It seems impossible ‘in this day and age’ that such a thing could happen. It wasn’t a mechanical issue, or a rogue crew, or pirates, or a freak storm. The Washington Post reported one of the …
Light Bulbs, Red Lines, and Rotten Onions
I’ve talked about the MV Hoegh Osaka incident before. A huge ship that left port out of balance and soon was grounded on the Bramble Bank sandbar off the Isle of Wight. The official British Marine Accident Investigation Branch (MAIB) report determined that a “fundamental principle of seamanship appears to have been allowed to drift, giving rise to potential unsafe practices.” Today I read an …
Chris Hadfield on Fear
“A lot of people live in fear because they haven’t figured out how you’re going to react when faced with a certain set of circumstances. I’ve come to terms with this by looking deeply into whatever makes me fearful—what are the key elements that get the hairs up on the back of my neck—and then figuring out what I can …