Human factors and aeromedical factors

What this lesson is for: teaching aeromedical factors as things that happen to a real student on a real flight, and learning to spot one in a student who has not told you about it.

Students do not report feeling unwell. They get quiet, or they fixate, or they start making an error they were not making an hour ago. Reading that is the skill.

Read:

• FAA-S-ACS-25, Area of Operation II, Task A.
• FAA-H-8083-25C, the aeromedical chapter, plus the October 2025 addendum.
• From live eCFR: 91.17.

Deliverable: Write down one occasion when you flew, or nearly flew, less than fully fit. Say what you noticed, what you did, and what you would tell a student in the same position. Half a page. It does not need to be dramatic. Most of them are not, which is the point.

Second deliverable. Write the ground lesson you would teach on human factors and aeromedical factors, to the template in standards/LESSON-PLAN-TEMPLATE.md, in your own words. This is one of your seventeen P3 plans, covering the human factors, aeromedical, or scanning cluster. Bring it on paper.

The half page above is yours. The plan is how you would use a story like it without making the lesson about you.

1. Fitness to fly, and self-assessment as a habit you can teach.
2. Hypoxia, hyperventilation, and carbon monoxide.
3. Spatial disorientation and the vestibular illusions.
4. Visual illusions, including the ones that get people on approach.
5. Motion sickness, dehydration, fatigue, and stress.
6. Medications, alcohol, and scuba.
7. Recognizing a factor in a student who has said nothing.
8. You teach.

• Teach an assigned factor for about eight minutes.
• Notice what is going on with your Simulated Student today, and say what you would do about it.

1. You teach an assigned aeromedical factor for about eight minutes, including what it looks like in flight and what the pilot does about it.
2. You notice your Simulated Student's unreported condition during the lesson, or identify it when asked at the debrief.
3. You state what you would do in the airplane on noticing it, including whether the lesson continues.
4. You name two observable behaviors that would suggest a student is affected without having said so.
5. You deliver a self-critique before hearing your instructor's.

• Knowing the illusion list and not recognizing one when it is described to you. Recall and recognition are different skills.
• Teaching hypoxia as a high-altitude problem. Carbon monoxide will do it at 2,000 ft on a cold day with the heater on.
• Waiting to be told. Your student will not tell you.
• Pushing on through airsickness to get value out of the hour. It is the least valuable hour available, and it can put a student off flying entirely.
• Reading fatigue as a lack of commitment. It is on the FAA's own list of learner emotional reactions, which you met back in lesson 1.
• Being vague about alcohol and scuba. Know these cold. Students ask.

Not applicable. Ground lesson. The in-flight version of this decision, whether to end a lesson because of a student's condition, is yours from lesson 25 onward.

This lesson has no Video Slots.