Page 120 - Never Fly Solo

SITUATIONAL AWARENESS | 93
affect the mission (weather, divert fields, threats, fuel state,
status of wingmen, and so on). When your SA is high, you can
adapt to changes quickly and maintain mission effectiveness.
Without it, you’re useless.
This anxious feeling of confusion and helplessness brought
on by an emergency, a threat, a procedural error, or, most
important, a rapidly changing environment, is what fighter
pilots refer to as “tumbleweed.” Picture a tumbleweed blow-
ing aimlessly across the plains, at the mercy of the wind, des-
tination unknown. When you are tumbleweed in a jet fighter,
that’s exactly how you feel. Adrift in the sky and with no situ-
ational awareness, you are of no value to the mission or the
team. Your only thought is to get back on track and, most
important, find your way back to your wingmen.
Radio communication is the most critical way to build SA
in combat. When all else fails, it can save your life. However,
going “dark”—not hearing (and thus not knowing) exactly
what is happening in a situation—can reduce even a seasoned
combat pilot to a powerless, ineffective second-guesser. On
that night in Iraq, a simple lapse on my part cut communica-
tion to my wingmen and almost threw our entire mission into
disarray. These lapses of communication can wreak havoc in
business.

MISSION BRIEFING

Good communication has to be planned. The problem is that
most organizations have terrible communication plans—or
none at all.
A Web poll conducted by the Computing Technology
Industry Association found that of more than a thousand
people who took the poll, nearly 28 percent pointed to “poor