“This can’t be happening.”

Circling 1500 feet above the Pacific to get into Half Moon Bay’s airport traffic pattern, out of the blue, the sole engine of my Piper Arrow failed. The sudden quiet, the swift dropping of the nose by a few degrees, the sinking sensation in the stomach. Two successful, but short-lived restart attempts later, we were in gliding range for a safe landing on runway 30.
The only reason why I, with my 90 hours total flight experience, made it that day, although “this can’t be happening” was the only clear thought in my mind: I had received the right kind of instruction for the situation.
Since that day back in 1995, I have been a believer when it comes to training.

A dark and windy night, many years later. Lining up for the last take-off of a long day; “please expedite”. And while I advanced the thrust levers and checked the acceleration, trying to focus, I could not help but ask myself: Would I be prepared to take the right decision if something came along during the take-off run, at high speed?

I had trained plenty of rejected take-offs. No problems here. But what about the decision making? Be go minded is what we are told, but all the exercises I had done ended with a – mostly predictable – stop. How well did this prepare me for the difficult decisions – complex, ambiguous, unthought of?

There must be a way to prepare better. I found inspiration in the mental training used by high profile athletes like eight-time skiing world cup champion Marcel Hirscher, participated in an RTO reaction time study, read all that I could find about rejected take-offs, and on how contemporary psychologists and neuro scientists look at decision making under time pressure. With the help of my team, more than 300 take-offs gone wrong were reviewed. With all this in mind, I started designing a training software.

So ADMT came to life. The simulation allows us to try out decision making playfully, to experience and demonstrate numerous scenarios. We can establish canned decisions and further the ability to recognize situations early that warrant a stop. It helps us understand why it is so important to continue after V1, even on a long runway, and to counter our “stop-mindedness”: The strong neurological reflex to reject when startled, resulting from years of simulator exercises that always require a stop.

As I said, I believe in training. And decision making, like any other skill, can be trained.