Situational Awareness – Life or Death

by Jack

Over thousands of years of our evolution we’ve adapted to our world and become much less aware of our surroundings.  By that I mean, we’ve prioritized what our mind wants to perceive and what we deliberately shut out and ignore.  Our world is pretty safe compared to a 100,000 years ago, so we’ve slacked off our personal awareness and some could arguably say, we’ve gone too far.

Mankind in the early years was keenly aware of the dangers around us – we had to be.  So, we gave situational awareness (SA to the military) a top priority.   I imagine that we carefully watched our step back in the day, walking in the jungle, because one misstep could be fatal.   No doubt we were alert to sights, sounds and smells that could threaten our safety much like a wild animal of today.   Of course those who didn’t…. the slower, the less alert, were quickly removed from the gene pool.  Consequently primitive man was more robust, quick witted and alert.  Times have changed and we don’t need those finely honed survival skills.   We’re so much safer now and consequently we have more free time to devote to education, leisure and work and awareness is NOT a priority.

Too many people take personal awareness far too casually, to the point of being oblivious. Case in point: It’s a college campus. A hooded gunman dressed in black clothing carrying a military rifle and a holstered pistol is walking directly toward a 20 year old student, she’s on her cell phone and she’s so focused on the conversation that she shuts out everything beyond three feet. She never saw him coming and more likely she never heard the shot that took her life. (Santa Monica 2013)

A picnic is planned and Bill wants to pick up a 6 pack of beer and soda. He parks his car in front of the store and walks briskly through the glass doors, but to his chagrin he is blown back out the doors by a 12 gauge shotgun.  He walked right into a holdup.  He could have looked inside the store at any time from any number of windows, even from the glass doors, but he was thinking “picnic” and the last thing that was on his mind..literally the last thing. 

These are two real world examples of things that happen when you deny your natural instincts, when you are oblivious your surroundings.  There’s thousands more examples that could be listed here, little things that happen every day because people are so oblivious.

Almost every traffic accident, home accident or boating accident is a failure by one of more people to be aware and employ the basic common sense. Ironically, we’ve allowed ourselves to become oblivious people thanks to previous successes in the area of society-wide safety.

On 9-11 people were often saying, we never saw it coming! Four planes hijacked and flown into building, who could have anticipated that one? Nobody….well, except for a few thousand people working in the military and for government law enforcement and intelligence agencies, not to mention the entire Association of Flight Attendants, the AFA. They had long lobbied for secure cockpit doors to be kept locked during flight. Why flight attendants and not the pilots? Good question. I can only think that was because flight attendants deal more directly with the public and their situational awareness was more keenly attuned because of that. Pilots rarely interact with the public and it’s likely their guard was down – at least compared to the AFA folks.

We spend billions on personal security and billions more for government to prevent or detect criminal activity.  However, when risks are discovered and brought to the attention of the government bosses the typical reaction is denial.  Wonder why?  From my own experience the prevailing mindset is, “Don’t you ever be the first one on the block to cry wolf, you might look bad!”   And if it also involves spending a lot of money, those same supervisors will play the devil’s advocate better than the Devil himself and they’ll always find rational ways not to do anything.

The airline industries answer to the AFA’s concerns was to say it was extremely expensive to change out cockpit doors and such an expenditure could not be justified. Well, it was justified, but only after 9-11 and we had 3000 dead victims.

Speaking of 9-11, the pilots for Flight 93 on 9-11 were real oblivious guys. They were listening to some of the radio chatter about the hijackings but did nothing proactive for their security.   The wife of the co-pilot, an airline employ, was so worried about a possible hijacking she sent an ACARS message to her husband, (a digital message, equivalent to an email) that said, “”Beware any cockpit intrusion—two a/c [aircraft] hit World Trade Center”.  That’s a pretty blunt warning!  “Beware of cockpit intrustions…”   How can a warning be anymore direct?   Anyway, these two professionals continued their chit chat and did not rush to secure the cockpit door.   Why didn’t take that blunt warning seriously?  Perhaps denial because their situational awareness was dulled by years of flying without an incident?  As a result within five minutes both pilots were dead, their jugular veins sliced with box cutters.   Their lackadasical attitude toward pending danger would lead to the deaths of all 44 passengers.   Their plane soon created a smoking hole in the midwest.  

Don’t be that oblivious person – we would hate to see you leave the gene pool too early.