How To Navigate the Disorienting Monotony of Uncertainty

There is a phenomenon responsible for many aircraft accidents over the decades known as Visual Illusion. It’s long been recognised that visual illusions can disorientate pilots or give rise to them not recognising their proximity to the ground, and it’s therefore a subject well covered in our training and guarded against by the consistent cross-checking of instrumentation and navigational aids in the cockpit to corroborate the information our eyes and brains receive.

Our visual interpretation of our environment can be affected by the slope and texture of the terrain, lights at night or lack thereof (known as the black hole effect), and weather such as cloud, mist, or fog for example. Before the advent of the advanced navigation equipment, we use today, pilots were also known to lose their sense of direction over large expanses of water or sand where there were no recognisable landmarks to orient themselves by or mark their progression. Traveling over such terrain could cause uncertainty, mental confusion and panic.

In April last year, as we all began to become increasingly uncomfortable with the world having ground to a halt, I wrote an article entitled “Keep Your Scan Going — Don’t Fixate”, which refers to the danger of becoming fixated on one problem in particular and forgetting to look up, and continue to scan the rest of the information available as pilots are…