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Investigations into the causes of civil aviation, nuclear powerplant, military aviation and commercial shipping accidents have shown that human error is a contributing factor in 60 to 80 percent of the cases. Long term research has demonstrated that these events share common characteristics. Many problems encountered by the operators have very little to do with the technical aspects of the tasks required. Instead, problems are associated with poor group decision making, ineffective communication, inadequate leadership, ineffective listening and poor task or resource management. These observations have led to the consensus in industry and government that training programs should place emphasis on these “interpersonal skills”. In aviation, coordinated efforts by regulators, researchers and industry have produced sophisticated simulator training in Crew Resource Management that has resulted in significant changes in flight crew performance in actual flight.

Human memory is the fundamental process that accounts for differences between expert and novice pilot thinking capabilities. Sensing, organizing and using information requires the resources of short term and long term memory systems. Both types of memory are critically impacted by the quantity and structure of the available information. Since a pilot's stored information includes aeronautical knowledge (facts), procedural knowledge (ATC, aircraft and systems), training, attitudes, emotions and general skills, as well as experience, it is reasonable to expect that at least some portion of the expert thinking capabilities can be learned without relying solely on knowledge gained through actual flight experience. One goal of this paper is to identify the expert capabilities that could be learned in a training environment.