Losing “Situational Awareness”

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114 – February, 2023

By Chris Robinson

During the years immediately after university graduation, I got to know a number of Navy and Marine Corps fighter pilots. A recurring “mantra” with these pilots was the need to always maintain “situational awareness,” one element of which is how aware is the pilot of what’s happening to him/her and his/her airplane at the moment and what will be happening in the future. This is of particular importance to fighter pilots since, to lose situational awareness, particularly in a combat situation, can cause a Strike Eagle, Fighting Falcon, Raptor, Hornet or Tomcat driver to have a very bad day indeed.

A loss of situational awareness is known by a lot of different terms: woolgathering, mental hiccup, synapse lapse, scatterbrain, absent-minded, mental block, blunder, goof-up, senior moment, bonehead move, misfire and so on. What virtually always results from a situational awareness loss, by that name or any other, is an “Oh, (supply your own epithet)!” moment.

Although the consequences are not nearly as dire as they can be for fighter pilots, for dog people participating in performance events, a loss of situational awareness almost always means you managed to screw things up so royally that you’ve caused the dog to non-qualify or, in the case of field trials, be dropped. Either way, the end results are the same: You’ve just blown a lot of money on entry fees and travel for zippo and you can’t blame the dog because what happened is entirely your own fault. Members of the U.S. military have an acronym that provides a perfect description for this state of affairs. It’s called “fubar” but since this is a family publication, if you don’t already know the words that make up that acronym, you’ll have to look it up. Sadly, that cloud of mental fog that leads to a tale of woe often occurs when someone is going for that last qualifying score or is on the verge of the win that will give the dog a new title.

Click here to read the complete article
114 – February, 2023

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Posted by AnthonyA on Feb 14 2023. Filed under Current Articles, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.