"The best emergency is the one you're not in." D-7 SPG.

60-65% of aviation mishaps are attributable to human error, and approximately 90% of those errors stem from poor judgment and inattention.

When cockpit crews operate under excessive workloads, they are prone to impaired decision-making, reduced situational awareness, and diminished problem-solving abilities.

In other words, they start to lose their marbles.

With improvements in the quality and reliability of today's aircraft, powerplants, and systems, cognitive failures, rather than equipment malfunctions, have become the primary contributors to modern aviation accidents and incidents.

Acknowledging this, the SPG is seeking to determine whether this first-time available training technology, using elective Evidence-Based Training (EBT) exercises, would be effective in providing General Aviation Auxiliary pilots and crews with the latest professional-grade industry best-practice methods for controlling and reducing crew workloads while experiencing and practicing it in real-time in a High-Gain/No-Risk environment. 

EBT in aviation is a safety-focused approach that relies on research and evidence to design and deliver practical aircrew training exercises tailored to the type of flying the Auxiliary does, based on data-driven analysis of real-world operational events on the routes the Auxiliary patrols.

Through a series of High-Gain/No-Risk elective exercises, crews can practice and experiment with non-jeopardy, high-workload situations that can be demonstrated, practiced, and repeated as often as desired.

At the start of the series, each participant is issued a personalized cloth sack. Upon completing each exercise in the series, one marble is issued to each participant to be kept in their sack along with all other marbles acquired through subsequent training exercises, up to a maximum of 25 marbles.

Although AuxAir patrols are conducted in day VFR conditions with reasonably wide safety margins, things don't always go according to plan.

The concept being examined here is that, if elective practice sessions were made available in which a marble is issued each time, would these CRM exercises be useful if an actual event or situation occurs in the future that requires someone to remove some marbles from the bag to address an issue; there will always be some remaining, thus preventing someone from totally losing their marbles.