Situational Awareness is the ability to perceive, comprehend, and project the dynamic elements of the operating environment. All three levels matter — but it is the third, projection, that this behaviour addresses. Perceiving what is happening now is necessary. Understanding what it means is essential. Projecting what will happen next, and what threats that projection contains, is what separates a reactive crew from a proactive one.

This behaviour — anticipating accurately what could happen, then making realistic and effective contingency plans — is the operational expression of that third level. A duty day can be read as a sequence of threats that must be identified before they develop, assessed for severity, and either avoided or mitigated. The crew that performs this function continuously and deliberately arrives at destination having managed a series of problems that many other crews would describe as a difficult day. The crew that does not perform it arrives at the same threats already inside them.

"Operating a commercial aircraft is essentially about dodging the bullets our environment shoots at us. The more you practise threat anticipation, the better you become — until it is second nature."

Why This Behaviour Matters

The claim that this is the single most important behaviour in the Core Competency framework is not hyperbole. Consider what it enables. Safety is enhanced because potential hazards are identified and addressed before they become active. Threat and Error Management is only effective if the threat is identified — and the earlier it is identified, the greater the range of options available to deal with it. Failure management in non-normal and emergency situations is more effective when the crew has anticipated the threats associated with that failure rather than encountering them for the first time under pressure.

And consider what its absence costs. A crew that does not anticipate threats arrives at each one with less time, less capacity, and fewer options. They are managing the situation rather than leading it. The cognitive load of responding to a developing threat is always higher than the cognitive load of having anticipated and mitigated it in advance. Every unmitigated threat that develops into an active problem consumes workload — which degrades situational awareness — which reduces the capacity to anticipate the next threat. The spiral is rapid and well-documented.

The TEM connection

Threat and Error Management begins with threat identification. A crew that brings threat anticipation to the forefront of every briefing is not performing a compliance exercise — they are building the shared mental model that enables the whole TEM framework to function. Errors will occur. The question is whether the crew has already identified the threats that make those errors consequential, and planned their mitigation.

How to Achieve Proficiency

Proficiency in this behaviour is built through several reinforcing practices. None of them are complicated. All of them require deliberate, consistent application.

Building the habit of anticipation
1
Lead with threat identification in every briefing
Bring threat identification to the forefront — not as a checklist item at the end, but as the organising principle of the briefing. Identify the threat, then follow it immediately with a discussion of how the crew will avoid or mitigate it. Identification without a mitigation plan is an incomplete briefing.
2
Use training to build pattern recognition
Every simulator event and line training sector is an opportunity to practise threat anticipation in a structured environment. Prepare for each event by considering the threats it may contain and planning the avoidance or mitigation before it begins. The more you practise this, the more automatic it becomes — until threat identification is happening continuously, not just at briefing time.
3
Draw on experience — and share it
Experienced pilots have encountered threats that less experienced ones have not yet seen. This knowledge is not automatically transferred — it has to be discussed. If you are less experienced, ask questions. If you are more experienced, share the insight. Threat anticipation in aviation is a collective competency as much as an individual one: the more widely experience is shared, the better the industry's collective threat model becomes.
4
Create the Leadership and Teamwork conditions
Threat anticipation in a multi-crew environment depends on open communication and genuine participation. A crew member who has identified a threat but does not feel the environment supports raising it is a crew member whose threat awareness is invisible to the team. Leadership and Teamwork is the enabling competency here — the Captain who creates an atmosphere of open exchange gets more threat identification than one who does not.
5
Use structured models
Frameworks like TDODAR create the conditions for threat anticipation to happen systematically rather than ad hoc. When the structure of thinking is ordered and logical, threats are less likely to be missed. The model is not a substitute for judgement — it is the scaffolding within which good judgement operates more reliably under pressure.
6
Use the technology available
Weather radar, ACARS, TCAS, GPWS, electronic charts and performance tools all exist to extend the crew's threat awareness beyond what unaided perception can achieve. A radar that is on but not set up correctly — brightness inadequate, tilt misconfigured — is not a functioning threat anticipation tool. The technology has to be actively used, not merely present.

The Thunderstorm Example

Thunderstorms are a clear-cut case. Every operations manual prohibits flight through them. They are generally predicted at the briefing stage — visible on weather charts, predictable in location and timing. The avoidance strategy can be discussed before departure: route deviations, departure delay, fuel for holding or diversion, coordination with dispatch. By the time the aircraft is airborne, the briefed plan is already in place.

And yet incidents with thunderstorm penetration continue to occur. The mechanism is usually not ignorance of the weather — it is a gap between the threat being identified and the mitigation being actively maintained. The radar needs to be on. It needs to be set up correctly. The brightness needs to be adequate. The tilt needs to be appropriate for the flight phase. A radar that is technically functioning but poorly configured is not providing the threat information the crew believes it is. Incidents have occurred in exactly this way — the equipment present, the crew unaware.

The lesson is not about thunderstorms specifically. It is about the difference between identifying a threat at the briefing and maintaining the mitigation throughout the flight. Anticipation is not a single act. It is a continuous discipline.

Workload and spare capacity

Effective threat anticipation requires spare cognitive capacity — the mental bandwidth to look ahead rather than simply manage the present. This is where Workload Management becomes directly enabling. A crew that is task-saturated cannot simultaneously scan the horizon for threats. Managing workload to preserve spare capacity is not incidental to threat anticipation — it is the precondition for it.

The Attitude Behind the Behaviour

There is a specific attitude that underpins proficiency in this behaviour, and it is worth naming directly. It is the attitude that errors will occur — including errors by you — and that the correct response to an error is recovery, not blame. A crew operating in an environment where error is treated as a personal failing will underreport threats and suppress the early identification of developing problems. A crew operating in an environment where error is treated as a normal feature of complex operations — to be anticipated, trapped early, and recovered from quickly — will surface threats earlier and manage them more effectively.

The golden takeaway is straightforward: make Threat and Error Management the centre of your thinking. Use every briefing to surface anticipated threats and agree the mitigation. Manage workload to protect the spare capacity that situational awareness — and threat anticipation — depends on. And understand that the nine Core Competencies are not independent elements. Each one enables the others. Proficiency in threat anticipation depends on Leadership and Teamwork to surface the threats, Communication to share them, Workload Management to create the capacity to look for them, and Problem Solving and Decision Making to act on what is found.

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