Cognitive abilities are related to job performance. However, there is less agreement about the relative contribution of general versus specific cognitive abilities to job performance. Similarly, it is not clear how cognitive abilities operate in the context of complex occupations. This study assessed the role of cognitive abilities on the…

In the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks against the United States, people immediately compared the attack with the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor sixty years prior. In this article, we explore how US and world history textbooks published shortly after Pearl Harbor and 9/11 depicted and contextualized both events. The textbooks…

When searching for a known target, mental representations of target features, or templates, guide attention towards matching objects and facilitate recognition. When only distractor features are known, distractor templates allow irrelevant objects to be recognised and attention to be shifted away. This is particularly true in X-ray baggage search,…

The Wright brothers, Wilbur and Orville, are often depicted as lone geniuses, secretly assembling the first successful powered aircraft far from civilization at Kitty Hawk on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. There is a germ of truth in the popular story, but only a germ. The brothers succeeded while so many other experimenters failed not because…

The winter storm of late 2022 caused difficulties for many US-based airlines, but none more so than Southwest Airlines. Like other airlines, Southwest canceled flights in the early stages of the storm. Their attempted recoveries failed due to procedural and technology issues. The airline was unable to cope with the magnitude of canceled flights,…

One of the key findings of prospect theory is that people tend to treat potential gains differently to potential losses. Consistent with earlier findings across a range of areas, pilots were risk averse when faced with an uncertain situation involving monetary gains and risk seeking when faced with a monetary loss. Prospect theory has largely been…

In two experiments, participants tracked the identity and location of moving words. The task bears resemblance to one performed by air traffic controllers who track multiple moving aircraft, where they are identified with relatively complex alphanumeric call signs. In Experiment 1, stimulus familiarity was manipulated by comparing the tracking of…

Universities worldwide have come to embrace the rhetoric of environmental sustainability and a commitment to climate action while simultaneously seeking to internationalize themselves within the context of the global economy. In seeking to internationalize, universities are highly dependent on air travel, for both their academic staff and…

Currently, the aviation business is a popular service that helps people travel conveniently, quickly, and safely. People in the airline business have become more stressed with the need to learn about inflight safety-based competence to effectively serve the broad range of passengers' needs. One reason for this is the nature of their jobs, which…

Due to time constraints, interviews aimed to detect deception in airport settings should be brief and veracity assessments should be made in real time. In two experiments carried out in the departure hall of an international airport, truth tellers were asked to report truthfully their forthcoming trip, whereas liars were asked to lie about the…

This paper investigates how flight instructors view the utility of competency-based education/training (CBE/T) during the training of new pilots. A total of ten flight instructors were interviewed and analysed through an interpretive paradigm of grounded theory. The findings indicate flight instructors of all experience levels have difficulty…

Increasingly higher demands are being made on the capacity-limited cognitive capabilities of human operators as they strive to maintain situation awareness (i.e., understanding "what is going on") and performance in complex tasks. In the current study we asked whether: (a) training administered via a mobile phone-based app could improve…

This paper provides a perspective on learning in which training and situated learning complement each other in developing cabin crew competence. Traditionally, airlines have approached cabin crew training from a competency-based, behavioural perspective with limited engagement in the actual work context. This ethnographic study builds on…

Similar to how stealth materials were developed to reduce the radar wave energy returning from an aircraft, here we explore a low-cost laboratory demonstration that uses similar principles to prevent detection of an object by an ultrasonic sensor. This demonstration setup can be used as a starting point to encourage students to explore the surface…

During every moment of our lives, we are surrounded by radiation from natural and manmade sources. Our bodies contain radionuclides from which we receive radiation. Radionuclides are found in the foods we eat and in the ground we walk on. We receive cosmic radiation from space. Radionuclides are also found in the airborne particles we breathe. The…