Situational Awareness | Including it in Flight Training 

The Importance of Situational Awareness in Fixed Wing Training 

Situational awareness (SA) is a vital flight skill, but unlike steep turns or short-field landings, it’s not something you can master in a single lesson. It must be developed over time, trained, reinforced, and evaluated. In airplane flight training, instructors should go beyond teaching rote procedures and help students build a mental model of what’s happening and what’s coming next. This means learning to anticipate, not just react. 

Situational awareness in fixed-wing flying includes knowing your aircraft’s configuration, energy state, location, weather, traffic, and how each of these might evolve during the next phase of flight. Pilots in training often become task-saturated during early solo flights or checkride preparation, which can cause tunnel vision. But when SA is trained intentionally, students can learn to pause, reassess, and re-prioritize, even in high-stress situations. 

Situational Awareness Exercises for Fixed Wing Training 

One effective training technique is “verbal SA mapping.” Instructors ask students to verbalize their understanding of their current situation throughout the flight: “We are at 3,500 feet, 10 miles from the airport, descending for left traffic, gear is down, and I’m watching for traffic entering the pattern.” This habit builds mental discipline and keeps the student in the moment. Over time, it becomes second nature and allows pilots to detect when something doesn’t feel right, before it becomes unsafe. 

Another useful exercise is to intentionally introduce low-risk distractions in a training flight and observe how the student regains situational awareness. For example, drop a pencil or simulate a passenger question. After the distraction, instructors should ask the student to: 

• Re-verify altitude, heading, and course. 

• Re-establish where they are in the flight plan. 

• Re-state the next step and any potential risks. 

Situational Awareness Training Strategies 

Here’s a list of strategies to integrate SA training into fixed-wing instruction: 

• Pause and plan: Encourage mental check-ins during cruise and before every descent or landing phase. 

• Teach task management: Train students to recognize task saturation and drop non-essential tasks. 

• Use cockpit flows and callouts: These reinforce awareness of configuration and system status. 

• Integrate scenario-based training: Weather diversions, ATC confusion, and traffic conflicts build adaptability. 

• Review mistakes non-punitively: Focus on what the student missed and how they can catch it next time. 

Conclusion 

Situational awareness isn’t something you “have” or “don’t have”—it’s something you can build like a muscle. Instructors should model it, coach it, and assess it during debriefs. The goal isn’t perfection, but rather resilience: the ability to recognize when SA has slipped and to recover quickly. In next week’s article, we’ll explore how this same skill is trained in helicopters—where task complexity, low-level flying, and mission variability add even more pressure to keep your head in the game.