Aeronautical decision-making (ADM) training : the identification of training needs, developing a training program and evaluating the effectiveness of a training intervention

摘要

Flying a high-technology fighter with high stakes and under high g-force is not only anissue of skilled psychomotor performance but also of real-time decision-making involvingsituation awareness, choice amongst alternatives, time pressure and risk assessment.There is no aeronautical decision-making (ADM) training program for military pilots inexistence neither in the R. O. C. Air Force nor around the world, although academicresearch had recognized the training needs for aeronautical decision-making. Thisresearch consists of three studies described in six chapters to develop an effective solutionfor ADM problems in order to improve military pilots' decision-making in a dynamic andtime-limited tactical environment.The first chapter is an executive summary comprised by three studies. The secondchapter identified ADM training needs by applied the Human Factors Analysis andClassification System (HFACS). Without good analysis it is impossible to identifyprecisely the training needs and the nature of the training content required for improvingpilots' performance. The third chapter examined five ADM training mnemonics in sixdifferent decision-making scenarios for developing an ADM training program. There aremany ADM mnemonics available. However, there was lack of empirical researchinvestigating the efficiency of those ADM mnemonics in the real-time tacticalenvironment. The fourth chapter evaluates the effectiveness of ADM training program bysimulator trials and pencil and paper trials. The fifth chapter is overall discussion,followed by the final chapter containing conclusions and recommendations.This research demonstrated that ADM training program did improve pilots' in-flightdecision-making performance. Improvements in pilots' situation assessment and riskmanagement were obtained, but these were traded-off for response time. To improve thequality of pilots' decision-making, the ADM training program needs to be coordinatedwith real-time simulator scenarios training. The findings have demonstrated that theADM training program significantly improved pilots' situation assessment and riskmanagement. However, it still needs to be established if these performance gainscontinue to be evident at a later date during actual operations.