Bombardier Safety Standdown to focus on pilot safety, attention control techniques

Bombardier’s annual Safety Standdown, scheduled for next week, will focus on attention control techniques for pilots.

The four-day event will be held at the Hyatt Regency Wichita hotel, starting Monday and running through Thursday.

More than 400 aviation professionals from across the industry will attend this year’s conference, organizers say. A webcast will also be offered.

“Attention is critical to performance and decision-making abilities,” Pat Daily, president of Convergent Performance and a Safety Standdown presenter, said in a statement.

Safety Standdown will provide aviation professionals with the tools and strategies needed to identify and transform behavior that’s critical to aviation safety, Daily said.

The training includes a variety of half-day workshops and half-day general sessions.

Seminars include a presentation on fatigue in aviation, a discussion on runway incursions and excursions, a workshop on aircraft upset events and recovery training, emergency procedures and inflight medical training and others.

The event also will include hands-on safety workshops on aircraft evacuation procedures, live firefighting and hypoxia awareness.

At a banquet on Wednesday, Capt. Gene Cernan, retired NASA Commander of Apollo XVII, will present the Eugene Cernan Safety Award to an aviation professional “who has gone above and beyond professional expectations.”

The agenda for the event can be found at www.safetystanddown.com.

Safety Standdown originated in 1996 as a human factors safety training event for the Learjet flight demonstration team.

Bombardier opened the seminar to all pilots in 1999, regardless of who manufactures the planes they operate.

Besides the U.S., Bombardier has held Safety Standdowns in Brazil, Canada, China, Mexico and Switzerland.

This story was originally published October 2, 2014 at 7:52 AM with the headline "Bombardier Safety Standdown to focus on pilot safety, attention control techniques."