Air traffic controllers do it too! Loukia Loukopoulos For a number of years now, my colleagues and I have been studying multitasking in the cockpit and have made a number of observations. Multitasking, the act of performing more than one task at the same time, is a highly prevalent and practically inevitable practice in the cockpit because of multiple, concurrent operational demands. Pilots regularly multitask with confidence and a business-as-usual attitude and they, like all humans, over-estimate their ability to multitask successfully. They readily accept the challenge without full appreciation of the risk(s) they take when doing so. Whilst multitasking pilots have a very high rate of success, errors and compromises to safety still occur. Of course pilots are no exception - our observations about multitasking extend well beyond the cockpit to all operators working highly-complex and safety-critical jobs. Like, say, air traffic controllers... Download PDF (2.2 MB) From an article published in the Winter 2010 issue of Hindsight magazine. |
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