3.  Meeting his own predisposed objective of landing at  Craig The pilot failed to be objective in this case. The identification  of courses of action were for his psychological success and  not the safety of his family. D o take the necessary action. In this case, the pilot  contaminates his decision-making process and selects an  approach to the instrument landing system (ILS) runway 32  at Craig where the weather was reported and observed far  below the minimums. E valuate the effect of the action. In many cases like this, the  pilot is so sure of his or her decision that the evaluation phase  of his or her action is simply on track and on glideslope,  despite impossible conditions. Because the situation seems  in control, no other evaluation of the progress is employed.  This is a reflexive type of decision-making anchored in  training and experience and is most often used in times of  emergencies when there is no time to practice analytical  decision-making. Naturalistic or automatic decision-making  improves with training and experience, and a pilot will find  himself or herself using a combination of decision-making  tools that correlate with individual experience and training.  Figure 5-2  illustrates the differences between traditional,  analytical decision-making and naturalistic decision-making,  both related to human behavior. Instances of human factor  accidents include operational errors that relate to loss of  situational awareness and flying outside the envelope. These  can be termed as operational pitfalls.  His processes have influenced changes in the ways the  Marines and Army train their officers to make decisions  and are now impacting decision-making as used within  the aviation environment. The ability to make automatic  decisions holds true for a range of experts from fire fighters  to police officers. It appears the expert’s ability hinges on the  recognition of patterns and consistencies that clarify options  in complex situations. Experts appear to make provisional  sense of a situation, without actually reaching a decision,  by launching experience-based actions that in turn trigger  creative revisions.  The outcome of this accident was predictable considering the  motivation of the pilot and his failure to monitor the approach  using standard and accepted techniques. It was ascertained that  the pilot, well above the decision height, saw a row of lights  to his right that was interpreted as the runway environment.  Instead of confirming with his aircraft’s situational position,  the pilot instead took over manually and flew toward the  lights, descended below the glidepath, and impacted terrain.  The passengers survived, but the pilot was killed. Operational pitfalls are traps that pilots fall into, avoidance  of which is actually simple in nature. A pilot should always  have an alternate flight plan for where to land in case of an  emergency on every flight. For example, a pilot may decide  to spend a morning flying the traffic pattern but does not top  off the fuel tanks because he or she is only flying the traffic  pattern. Make considerations for the unexpected. What if  another aircraft blows a tire during landing and the runway is  closed? What will the pilot in the traffic pattern do? Although  the odds may be low for something of this nature to happen,  every pilot should have an alternate plan that answers the  question, “Where can I land?” and the follow-up question,  “Do I have enough fuel?”  In an emergency situation, a pilot might not survive if he or  she rigorously applied analytical models to every decision  made; there is not enough time to go through all the options.  But under these circumstances, does he or she find the best  possible solution to every problem?  For the past several decades, research into how people  actually make decisions has revealed that when pressed for  time, experts faced with a task loaded with uncertainty, first  assess whether the situation strikes them as familiar. Rather  than comparing the pros and cons of different approaches,  they quickly imagine how one or a few possible courses of  action in such situations will play out. Experts take the first  workable option they can find. While it may not be the best of  all possible choices, it often yields remarkably good results. Weather is the largest single cause of aviation fatalities.  Most of these accidents occur to a GA operator, usually  flying a light single- or twin-engine aircraft, who encounters  instrument meteorological conditions (IMC) conditions  while operating under VFR. Over half the pilots involved  in weather accidents did not receive an official weather  briefing. Once the flight is under way, the number of pilots  who receive a weather update from automated flight service  station (AFSS) is dismal. An analysis done by FAA’s  Aviation Safety Information Analysis System (ASIAS)  found that during a recent five-year period, only 19 pilots  out of 586 fatal accident flights received any information  The terms naturalistic and automatic decision-making have  been coined to describe this type of decision-making. These  processes were pioneered by Mr. Gary Kleinn, a research  psychologist famous for his work in the field of automatic/ naturalistic decision-making. He discovered that laboratory  models of decision-making could not describe decision- making under uncertainty and fast dynamic conditions.  5-4 $^{ }$Automatic Decision-Making Operational Pitfalls