Situational Awareness begins with Leadership and Teamwork. It is enabled by Communication and supported by Workload Management. But its most consequential expression — the one where failure costs the most — is here: knowing, at every moment, what the aircraft is doing, where it is, where it is going, and what surrounds it.
The HPP behaviour names four distinct elements: the state of the aircraft and its systems, geographical position, anticipated flight path, and general environment. Each is a discrete dimension of awareness. Each can degrade independently. And each, when lost, creates a different category of threat. The pilot who holds all four simultaneously — and holds them accurately — is operating at the level the Core Competency framework expects.
Why Systems State Awareness Matters
The aircraft systems dimension is the one most easily overlooked in discussions of situational awareness — because when systems are functioning normally, they require no active management. The crew's attention naturally focuses on position, trajectory, and environment. Systems awareness becomes a background function.
The problem arises when a system degrades or fails and that degradation is not immediately obvious. A CAS message that appears during a high-workload phase and is acknowledged without being properly assessed. An ECAM action that is deferred because the crew is task-saturated. A fuel imbalance that develops gradually and is not noticed until it is operationally constraining. In each case, the crew's mental model of the aircraft's capability diverges from reality — and every subsequent decision is built on that divergence.
Modern aircraft are designed to be highly reliable and to manage minor degradations automatically. This is operationally beneficial — but it creates a complacency risk. A crew that has never experienced a significant system failure in line operations can develop a passive relationship with system monitoring. The behaviour requires active, accurate assessment — not passive assumption that all is well because the aircraft hasn't told them otherwise.
Why CFIT Remains a Threat
Despite GPWS and TAWS becoming standard equipment, Controlled Flight into Terrain continues to be a significant contributor to fatal accident statistics. The reason is instructive: the majority of CFIT accidents are not caused by equipment failure. They are caused by pilot error — which places them firmly within the scope of the Core Competency Matrix, and specifically within the scope of this behaviour.
The safety systems are the last line of defence. They activate when the aircraft is already in a dangerous state. The behaviour described here is the line of defence before those systems — the one that should prevent the aircraft from reaching the state that activates them. When this behaviour fails, the crew's only remaining protection is a warning system designed to catch what their situational awareness missed.
How to Achieve Proficiency
This behaviour does not exist in isolation. Achieving proficiency requires proficiency in others — and understanding which competencies enable it is part of understanding how to develop it.
Workload Management creates the capacity
Situational awareness of trajectory and terrain requires spare cognitive capacity. A crew that is task-saturated cannot simultaneously maintain a three-dimensional picture of the aircraft's predicted path. The Workload Management behaviour of planning, preparing, prioritising, and scheduling tasks effectively is directly enabling — because it is the behaviour that generates the spare capacity from which terrain and trajectory awareness is built and maintained.
This connection runs in both directions. A crew that loses terrain awareness will rapidly find their workload increasing as they attempt to recover the picture. As workload increases, spare capacity decreases further — which degrades situational awareness more. The spiral is well-documented in accident reports.
"Being aware of the aircraft trajectory and terrain proximity should be the safety net we use before the safety systems kick in — these are the last line of defence."
The briefing is where it starts
Just as a good landing starts with an effective briefing, awareness of terrain and trajectory begins before the relevant phase of flight. Brief the terrain threat in good time. Identify exactly where the final descent will begin and how it is defined. Discuss the environment: expected weather, airspace, anticipated traffic. Agree what the triggers are for a go-around and what the missed approach procedure demands in the context of terrain.
A briefing that creates a shared mental model of the terrain and environmental picture does two things. First, it distributes the awareness across the crew — two people holding the picture is more robust than one. Second, it establishes the baseline from which deviations can be identified. A crew that has briefed the terrain threat will notice when the picture begins to diverge from what was expected. A crew that has not briefed it is starting from scratch when the deviation develops.
2D and non-precision approaches present a disproportionate CFIT risk. The absence of vertical guidance removes one of the primary cues that alerts a crew to trajectory deviation. Briefing must identify precisely where the final descent begins, how it is defined, and what the intermediate level-off requirements are. Company SOPs — early aircraft configuration, landing configuration by the final approach fix — exist to protect spare capacity at the point of maximum terrain threat.
Leadership and Teamwork builds the shared picture
No single pilot maintains perfect terrain and trajectory awareness alone through every phase of a busy approach. The Leadership and Teamwork behaviour of creating an atmosphere of open communication and participation exists, in part, to ensure that both pilots are contributing to and updating the shared mental model. If one pilot's picture is degrading, the other's should compensate — but only if the environment makes that cross-check natural and expected rather than a sign of distrust.
The ILS Vector Scenario
The following scenario is straightforward and operational — the kind of situation that occurs routinely on every approach. It demonstrates precisely how trajectory and environmental awareness produces a different outcome to its absence.
ATC issue an intercept heading. The crew analyse the resultant track and recognise that at the current heading, localiser capture will occur after the FAF — placing the aircraft above the glideslope on intercept. They request a heading adjustment. The approach continues normally.
Awareness of the operational environment and the aircraft's trajectory identified the developing situation early. The crew intervened before it became a constraint.
The same heading is issued. The crew do not notice the developing geometry. Late localiser interception means capture above the glideslope. Time is spent attempting to recover the approach. Workload increases. Spare capacity falls.
The distraction causes a late landing configuration selection — at the subsequent inquiry, the crew had failed to achieve correct landing flap. The go-around had not been briefed. Stabilised approach criteria had not been established as a trigger. The approach continued despite being clearly unstable.
The landing was deep, fast, and with excess energy. The result was a runway excursion.
A single awareness failure — the trajectory geometry on the intercept heading — cascaded through workload, configuration, stabilised approach criteria, and runway performance into an accident outcome.
This scenario is not exceptional. It has occurred many times. The cascading nature of the failure — from a single trajectory awareness gap to a runway excursion — illustrates exactly why this behaviour sits within Situational Awareness rather than a more procedural competency. Procedures catch specific failures. Situational awareness prevents the conditions in which those failures develop.
The safety systems will always be there as a backstop. But they are the last line of defence — not the first. The crew that relies on GPWS or a system alert has already lost the battle that this behaviour is designed to win. The picture should be continuously held, continuously updated, and continuously projected forward. What is the aircraft doing? Where is it? Where will it be? What is the environment around it? Those four questions, answered accurately and continuously, are what this behaviour requires.
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