A novel approach in facilitating aviation emergency procedure learning and recall through an intuitive pictorial system

The intent of this research was to examine the utility and merit of a novel system of intuitive symbols (a mnemonic strategy) in conjunction with the training of aviation emergency procedures (EPs) to U.S. Army aviation personnel in order to facilitate the accurate recall of those procedures. Aviators must deal with emergency situations by performing the necessary actions in an established sequence. Many are necessarily performed from memory. A previous study on aviator EP proficiency found that without active practice of the conventionally-learned textual procedures, recall ability decays significantly over a relatively short period of time which results in the inability to respond accurately in the event of an actual emergency. Previous research has demonstrated that providing students with instructions on the use of memorization techniques (mnemonic strategies) has resulted in improvements in their ability to recall information.; This study employed a pretest-posttest, control group design to test the effectiveness of this novel mnemonic strategy with respect to the aviators' levels of flight experience, their learning style preferences, and their overall subjective assessments of the system. The design was applied to three distinct groups based on experience levels (highly-experienced, minimally-experienced and naive). Descriptive and inferential statistics, along with correlations, were used to assess the study data which determined statistically significant differences between the IPS and traditional training methods.; Although the study's findings did not show the IPS as producing performance gains superior to that of the traditional method, the findings did demonstrate the utility and merit of the system as an augmentation to traditional textual procedures. The manner in which the symbols were able to facilitate the recall of uncommon, unfamiliar terms and phrases in a naive population to a level comparable to that of highly-experienced pilots in just one week, highlights the potential for such a mnemonic strategy to aid in the encoding of information into long-term memory. This information could lead to important innovations to current U.S. Army teaching techniques. A standardized pictorial system of aviation procedures may not just benefit individual graduate and student pilots, but could be a valuable contribution to military and civil aviation safety.