A Paradigm for Developing Operational Decision-Making (ODM) Training 2001-01-3027

The views and opinions expressed in this paper are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the positions or policies of any private, public or governmental organizations. Over the past 8 years, the authors have been developing a training-oriented paradigm for operational decision-making in the cockpit. While our emphasis has been on the civil aviation side, the model can easily adapted for the business aviation venue. The paradigm began to form at an aeronautical decision-making workshop in 1992 (Lofaro, Adams and Adams; 1992) around an expanding set of interrelated concepts. The set expansion resulted from the authors continuing to wrestle with identifying and explicating the critical components and processes for real-time operational decision-making, as well as the relationships among decision-making, crew resource management (CRM) and situation awareness (SA). The first paradigm component was the “rising risk continuum” (Lofaro and Smith, 1993), as embedded in event sets for LOFT. Later, the concepts/components of “critical mission impact areas” and the “critical mission factors” (Lofaro and Smith, 1998) that composed these mission critical areas were added. The final components are the operational envelope, cumulative risk and risk location in the ops envelope (Smith and Lofaro, 2001). In the model, the “pilot as risk manager” (Smith and Hastie, 1992; Lofaro and Smith, 1998; 1999) was the both the overlay and glue for the components

Recently, one author found the details of a real-life example of a Part 121 carrier approach/landing. This will used to, first, show how the model can be used in real-time and, second, contrast the decisions that would have been reached using the model with those actually reached by the Captain and, the results of the Captain’s decisions.