This research platform draws on different disciplines. Each one contributes to each section. Drawing on other disciplines requires interdisciplinary thinking. Gibson was thinking interdisciplinary when formulating his ecological approach and anti-Cartesian stance. A fundamental element of Gibson's ecological approach to visual perception is moving over surfaces. In this relationship with the surfaces, there are things the environment gives to the observer that the observer sees. Looking out onto the environment, what the environment reciprocates in structure and function for an animal, they are not subjective or contingent upon the moods or needs of the animal/observer. They are relational properties of the environment. There exist opportunities for the animal/observer whether or not an animal/observer wants to use them. The basic features of the environment what Gibson calls surfaces, edges, objects, medium, events, substances, and animate objects (1986) possess resources to perceive.

I refer to Gibson's affordances from his ecological approach to visual perception, but it was his aviation studies that drew me in. Gibson's explanation of distance perception involved a reconceptualization of the nature of environmental space that animals visually perceive. This particular revision was one example derived from Gibson's aviation studies. What Gibson called the visual world (1950a p. 6) was where he considered "the possibility that there is literally no such thing as a perception of space without the perception of a continuous background surface." This ground theory of Gibson's was to distinguish from his air theory, thich he noted was from an older approach. Gibson's revision of the visual world came out of his aviation studies in 1944 and 1947 (1987, p. 194), which reconsidered what is in the background of objects. According to Gibson (1986, p.148), the 'space' of the airplane pilot above in the air was determined where he/she was by the ground and the horizon of the earth, not by the air the pilot flies in. But that was from classified studies published in 1947. Gibson's ground theory is really about surfaces that are in the background giving some form, which Gibson calls layout. A layout has a place and objects, with features from which the observer perceives. But not in a two-dimensional space and not in depth perception. This is when Gibson's work gets interesting. For Gibson, this layout involves self-perception and is continually changing as the observer moves (Gibson 1986, p. 148), and from this angle, a view from the top or the side gives some distance from the object.

Gibson’s visual perception of the environment and his ecological approach are the guiding pathways, the conduit to describe what pilots see when they scan their surroundings, the air, the light – the atmosphere. Yet, it is with a motion in the present moment, what is available in the moment that affords the pilots bypassing a near accident or mechanical failure.

On a dark night flying in the Uummannaq district, north of 77° Latitude, in Greeland, a Captain and his co-pilot prepared the helicopter for a normal passenger flight. The way heliport is situated in Uummannaq, takeoff is immediately over open water or sea ice. The Captain recounted what happened one time, knowing flying at night has its drawbacks, particularly when there are no contours on the ground or horizon to reference. He begins, "I had visual and vestibular ‘disorientation' so to speak. Because your eyes tell you something and your vestibular system (sense of balance from the inner ear) tells you something totally different.

We took off from Uummannaq. And normally the wind is from the east from the ice. I was the Captain and as we got up to 400 or 500ft or something, on the tip of the island. From there you lose lights from the settlement. It gets completely dark. And then at least up to that time, it was before we got rules and values for flying in the dark (a millilux table shoring illuminance values in lux). I was manually flying the helicopter, with no autopilot or stabilizer. I looked to the side, saw that the lights went out from Uummannaq, then I flew a little bit more than normally, in order to look to the right to see the airport on the other side of fjord. All normal - I flew, looked to the right, and saw the airport. When I turned my head to look back, I completely lost it. My body told me that I was still turning right, but the instrument said I was level, so I just said to the copilot to take the controls. I lost it. He took the controls. No problem at all. But if I had been alone, it could have been a problem. The body tells you that you are turning, but the instrument says you are straight and level. And that's just by moving your eyes back to look back. It’s a strange feeling. He took the controls and continued to climb. Slowly the body adjusted. You have to trust the instrument no matter what. Trust the instrument. But know that signals body can give contradictory information from the instrument.

01:31:10:13 - 01:31:34:13

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Trust the instrument. Never trust your body and the signals the body gives you.

Spatial disorientation in flight

Flying over the 44,000km coastline, one cannot miss the glaciers and fjords – long, narrow, deep inlets of open water between mountains and high cliffs visible along the 300km wide ice-free coast. As Pilot 1 noted, “When flying, you have to think about it [hostile] more in terms of being prepared.” With the presence of the land, the sheer weight of it before my eyes, drew me to capture what ‘flying weather’ meant in Greenland. How do helicopter pilots perceive their flight environment defined as hostile? What does it mean to perceive the weather? It begins with pilots perceiving their environment through weather reports. From the weather data, they ‘visualize’ weather and objectify images of weather in order to predict or foresee weather outcomes based on approved reports. What, then, is that ‘objectified’ weather picture? Weather objectified in aviation theory is the physics of weather, the meteorology. Yet, placing weather into mental images doesn’t give much, rather, there is something about the environment, the terrain, the fjords, the open water, the sea ice, the inland ice, the atmosphere, that gives meaning and something to go by. For James J. Gibson (1982, 404), the environment affords specific things in which to perceive. In other words, pilots must know the specifics of the weather in what it affords for them to fly, postpone, or do nothing at all. True, yet, more importantly, it affords decision-making, an ability to make good calls when the situation could get bad.

Pilots also perceive their environment through the machine/helicopter when they fly in it. What then are the affordances of the machines/helicopters considering the previous 212 and current 155) in relation to pilot and flight environment – in real life – in Greenland’s hostile environment? To this point, there is a human-technology relation between the machine’s automation and the pilot. At the core of postphenomenology is the relations humans have with technologies. Through the work of Don Ihde, Peter-Paul Verbeek, Robert Rosenberger, and Asle H. Kiran, a field guide to postphenomenology (Rosenberger & Verbeek, 2015) examines technologies in terms of relations, in which technologies mediate our world and becomes the starting point for analysis, as opposed to employing philosophical theories at the onset to technology. Postphenomenology starts with technologies themselves enabling relations that are not one-sided, but referring to Ihde, a ‘two-sidedness’ emerges in how technologies shape and reshape, and in this process for both humans and the world, it allows for specific ‘mediating’ effects (Ihde, 1990, p. 76).

Drawing on Ihde’s two-sidedness of technological mediation, Kiran[1] (2015, p. 131) puts forth the notion of an enabling-constraining structure utilizing Gibson’s affordances. In this enabling-constraining structure, technologies shape how we do things and, at the same time, change the way we do them. In doing so, there is a notion of Gibson’s affordances that Kiran employs, as noted above. In the enabling-constraining structure, employing Gibson’s affordances is in terms of the materiality of technology and how technology affords certain uses of it, at the same time, points to how technological mediations are also constrained by the affordances of that technology. Through this angle in the ‘practical dimension’ of technological mediations exhibiting an enabling-constraining structure (Kiran 2015), simulators enable shortened procedural training time compared to training in the real aircraft, at the same, constrained by intensifying training when failures and emergencies are compacted into one hour (depending on operator/airliner). In other words, although simulators save time and money on practicing failures and procedures, pilots are constrained by training emergency procedures one after another. There is no pause. When the malfunction is removed/cleared, the next failure setup follows. At this rapid pace, there can be an overload on the pilot, for instance, on pilots with fewer SIM hours. On one hand, with more training, there is increasing familiarity with how to handle failures and emergencies as pilots get more SIM time. As Pilot 1 stated, “Because I’ve seen it before – in the SIM – I know how to handle it.” On the other hand, it may take a longer time to successfully clear an emergency in the SIM as compared to performing the task in the real aircraft, as some more experienced pilots have noted. How, then, are SIMs measured for effectiveness?

A formula for calculating the effectiveness of the SIM is measuring the amount of SIM time that saves comparable to training in the real aircraft, known as the Transfer Effectiveness Ratio (TER) (Roscoe, 1990). As SIMs save time in practicing procedures comparable to training in real life, the question of the effectiveness can be framed in two ways: one, as an instructional device for practicing procedures such as night flying approaches; second, as an aircraft surrogate in training specific skills such as practicing autorotations or dual engine failure. In this regard, what are the SIM’s enabling-constraining structure affordances that avail the pilot a level of preparedness? Asked in another way, does effective SIM training depend on the type of training as an instructional device or surrogate? Or is SIM training more effective in ‘creating’ the experiences in flight simulation in the virtual environment? (Describe real world in relation to SIM)

Thus, in examining the impact of technology of flight simulation in SIM training in relation to a level of preparedness, I draw on Ihde and Kiran’s postphenomenology referring to the technological affordances of certain uses. In doing so, I ask what the affordances of SIM training are in describing SIM sessions, a more constructive method as opposed to coming to a concrete conclusion. It is from observing Pilot 1 in multiple sessions, accumulated to approximately 10 hours of SIM in multi-crew operations, that I describe. Together with the affordances of SIM, and in evaluating the mediating force of technology in perceptions of the environment, that gives a lens to what it means to perceive the environment both virtual and in the real.

Here are words that are of importance and need defining in relation to the particular theoretical underpinning: perceive in relation to perceptions of light (atmosphere as a ‘medium’ and ‘knowing’ the environment), the environment in relation to substance and surfaces (virtual, terrestrial, geological, geographical, and atmospheric), and affords in relation to Gibsonian affordances. The theoreticals need their own space in this thesis, which is to keep the argument inbound. And not to throw this into a phenomenological quagmire.

What’s more, disciplines may not share the same ontology with words such as perception and environment; in fact, they have fundamental differences in the ontology of the mind and matter problem. It relates to the divide between object and subject, the dualistic element to objectify the physics of weather and the physiology of our eyes. As is the case, different disciplines define words in context. Environment is an excellent example. Is the environment a supplemented visual simulation or a terrestrial environment? Environment has many meanings depending on the context. Other words are stimuli or visual, and so on. Words mean different things today compared to when they were first used in the discipline such as phenomenology which after post-modernism, a more applied word is postphenomenology associated with Ihde’s (1990) seminal book Technology and the Life World. Theories have also created new words, such as affordances which is associated with Gibson who wanted a word that would refer to both animals and the environment, but there was no such word. His term affordances imply the complementarity of the animal and the environment. One discipline would define ‘technology’ in a timeline dating back to the first homo sapiens throwing a rock, whereas other disciplines would think of ‘technology’ as outdated when technology today is interlinked with how humans make decisions. The term artificial intelligence (AI) is more timely. In aviation, the use of AI programmed in flight computer systems and autopilots does a lot of the thinking for pilots. Case in point, aviation uses specific terms that do need clarification.

[1] Kiran also lays out different angles to the postphenomenology of ‘technology shaping of our lifeworld’ expressed through Ihde’s four dimensions of technological mediation.