At the last 7 NBAA International Operators Conferences, I have admonished pilots flying in Africa to beware, usually telling them, “When in the Jungle, don’t look like lunch!” Now comes the bad news. The metaphorical jungle is far more real and omnipresent—and not just in the wilds of Africa.

How many times do we read or listen to voice recorder transcripts and feel the dawning yet tardy awareness of a crew’s last seconds? It is only in recent years that we have acknowledged that parallel channel of our minds—the one that can still see the big picture when the majority of our brain is mired in the digits.

So as our aircraft and their systems become increas­ingly complex and our world becomes ever more threatening, it is imperative that we train ourselves to heed that little voice in the back of our minds, and obey our instincts when the short hairs start rising on the backs of our necks.

The problem is that our world’s headlong technologi­cal rush threatens to deprive us of our most valuable tool—this very intuition that has served humanity for generations.

With this thought in mind, I will always recall an inci­dent that happened when I was taking a year off from aviation. As manager of human factors training for the same shipping company for which I had flown for sev­eral years, I was helping to raise awareness regarding the naval equivalent of cockpit resource management.

The first months of the program called for endless reading of maritime journals. My favorite—Lloyds List—published an account of a Finnish high-speed ferry equipped with something called Cockpit Bridge— a highly automated central control station.

This replaced the vessel’s traditional apartment-sized workspace and wrapped its master and mate in a cloud of sensors and displays. Launched on its maiden voy­age to considerable fanfare, it ran aground within min­utes of untying from the pier.

An astounded press wondered aloud how such a thing could have come to pass. After all, wasn’t the technology supposed to prevent this sort of thing? The crew publicly offered half the answer, saying they weren’t told how to use the equipment.

The other half of the answer is that they were not led to understand that people are the ultimate sensory pro­cessors and sometimes we must revert to a more basic and instinctive mode of functioning.

This way of thinking can help you, whether in the air or on the ground, home or abroad. Years ago I was walking in Paris’ Left Bank with a fellow crewmember when things suddenly felt odd. I made the decision to go back the way we came, discovering that 3 men were following us—predators looking for prey, most likely.

The point is that that jungle can suddenly appear anywhere, especially when we have relaxed to the point of thinking all is well. So use all the tools at your disposal to keep yourself out of danger. Some are as new as science, others are more intuitive, dating back to the time when cave men learned that the world was a pretty rough place and a pointed stick was a good thing to have.