Abstract: Plan Continuation Errors (PCEs) is defined as the “failure to revise a flight plan despite emerging evidence that it is no longer safe”. In this paper, we reviewed the scientific literature on PCEs. PCEs usually occur in weather-related decision-making situations, manifested by pilots unintentionally or intentionally using Visual Flight Rules (VFR) to manipulate the aircraft into Instrument Meteorological Conditions (IMC). In this case, the pilot loses the mental model and cognitive skills necessary to maintain control of the aircraft due to the lack of visual reference information to the horizon, causing catastrophic consequences. Therefore, how to identify and analyze the psychological characteristics and mechanisms of pilot PCEs is not only a frontier subject in aviation psychology research, but also a major practical problem that needs to be resolved in the current aviation safety management practice.
The underlying mechanisms of the PCEs were summarized as follows: (1)Situation assessment. This mechanism believes that PCEs is caused by pilots who are completely unaware of severe weather conditions or fail to accurately diagnose weather changes and their severity. (2) Decision-making framework. This mechanism explains PCEs on the basis of the prospect theory and the sunk cost effect, which suggests that PCEs are caused by pilots' strong expectation of reaching their destination, which changed their decision-making framework, which in turn led to their underestimation of the severity of the weather. (3) Cognitive heuristics. This mechanism believes that pilots adopt cognitive shortcuts or cognitive heuristics to solve problems for easy cognitive workload, which can easily lead to cognitive bias in pilots' weather-related decision-making process, resulting in decision error and PCEs. In addition, researchers have conducted many empirical studies to understand factors that may affect pilot PCEs. To sum up, the results mainly focus on six aspects, including flight experience, personality characteristics, emotional state, weather radar display system, flight environment, organization, and social pressure.
On the basis of the review of existing research, three future directions for this line of research were also discussed. First, previous studies have mainly explored the psychological mechanisms of pilot PCEs from three aspects: situation assessment, decision-making framework and cognitive heuristics. However, these mechanisms have not revealed the whole picture of pilot PCEs, and most of them remain in the theoretical level. Future research can try to further explore the mechanisms of PCEs from a new perspective, such as perseveration behaviors. Second, previous PCEs research mainly focused on the information processing mechanism at the perceptual level, which belongs to the low-level cognitive processing process and is unable to reveal the psychological mechanism of PCEs more deeply. Therefore, future research should explore the higher cognitive neural mechanism of PCEs and try to reveal the cause and brain mechanism of PCEs more comprehensively. Third, current PCEs intervention studies are mostly from the perspective of human-computer interaction and cockpit human factor design, and there is a lack of intervention studies on the pilots themselves. Future research can be based on the psychological mechanisms of PCEs, and further expand the prevention research of PCEs for the pilots, such as carrying out weather cue recognition training based on the situation assessment mechanism of PCEs. Furthermore, future studies are expected to explore how to prevent PCEs from motivational, emotional, and heuristic strategies based on the framing effect and cognitive heuristic mechanisms.

Key words: pilot, plan continuation errors, aviation safety, psychological mechanism

摘要： 作为一种典型的飞行决策失误,计划延续失误是飞行员未根据实时情境变化及时调整已不安全的飞行计划,仍然按原计划持续飞行的现象,对于现代飞行安全具有重要影响。本文从情境评价、决策框架和认知启发等视角阐述了计划延续失误的心理机制,概括出飞行经验、人格特征、情绪状态、天气雷达显示系统、飞行环境、组织和社会压力等影响因素。未来要从新的视角进一步探究计划延续失误的心理机制,运用脑成像技术考察其神经基础,并加强对计划延续失误的干预研究。

关键词: 飞行员, 计划延续失误, 航空安全, 心理机制