Flight safety is an important aspect of any pilot training curriculum, and there is no better material than accounts of actual incidents. Precise data are often available from Flight Data Recorders (FDRs), and the Military Flight Operations Quality Assurance (MFOQA) program finds rich, meaningful high-level events in those data. Unfortunately, with current technology such flight data and events can only be replayed; pilots cannot actively re-fly the mishap unless someone has manually (and laboriously) recreated a scenario from it. There is value in the replay, but immersing the pilot as an active participant in a scenario that requires decisions and actions at critical points makes the training more relevant, memorable, and effective.

We are working to speed the process of creating scenarios from flight logs with a four-step process: 1) the original flight path is provided from FDR data and MFOQA events, either from the actual aircraft or from a re-creation in a simulator; 2) on the flight path, the scenario author identifies key events and pilot decision points; 3) the scenario author generalizes the events and decision points into "regions." The generalization step is an acknowledgement that a safety incident will never happen exactly the same way twice—the location, altitude, speed, or other aspects of the situation may be different from the original mishap; and 4) the author connects those regions into a continuous envelope. This constitutes the scenario. As long as pilots stay within this envelope during the simulator mission, they will encounter the circumstances involved in the mishap, and they will arrive at the mishap's critical decision points.

In this paper we will discuss the automated support necessary to accelerate the creation, and enable the monitoring, of mishap-based scenarios, and will give working examples of their application and benefits.