Situational Awareness Rating Technique (Sart): The Development of a Tool for Aircrew Systems Design

Human engineering activities in aircrew system design traditionally have been concerned with the reduction and management of operator workload. This chapter investigates how aircrew understand situational awareness (SA) and develops tools for its subjective estimation. It intends to derive methods for the subjective estimation of in order to assist in the quantification and validation of design objectives for crew-systems integration. Eighty four Test and Operational Royal Air Force aircrew were interviewed in three phases: Scenario Generation, Construct Elicitation, Construct Structure Validation. The interviews were semi–structured, conducted by psychologists according to a fixed protocol for knowledge elicitation, based on the Personal Construct/Repertory Grid Technique. SA is the knowledge, cognition and anticipation of events, factors and variables affecting the safe, expedient and effective conduct of the mission. The construct/scenario ratings obtained during construct elicitation were subjected to Principal Components analysis with Varimax factor rotation.