Who Is Flying This Plane Anyway? What Mishaps Tell Us about Crew Member Role Assignment and Air Crew Situation Awareness

This paper reports a detailed analysis of over 300 civilian incident reports that identified whether loss of situation awareness (SA) was related to air crew role assignment. The results indicate (a) that loss of SA is responsible for an incident more often when the captain is at the controls than when the first officer (FO) is at the controls, and (b) that the pilot flying (PF) is more likely to lose situation awareness than the pilot not flying (PNF). As a result, captains lose SA more often across aircraft types, flight segments, and weather conditions when they are the PF than when they are the PNF. The results also suggest that the person who is flying commits more of the critical errors that lead to an incident. Together, the results indicate that captains lose SA more often and make more tactical errors when they are at the controls than when they are not. Applications of this research include aircrew training, procedure development, and accident/incident analysis.