Plain English Meaning

A pilot can only pay attention to and think about so many things at the same time. When too much is happening at once, the mind gets clogged up and starts missing things, making mistakes, or falling behind. That clog point is the bottleneck.

Full Definition

Points in human mental processing where the brain's limited capacity to take in, interpret, decide on, or act upon information becomes overloaded, slowing or preventing further effective processing. In aviation, these bottlenecks occur when a pilot is asked to attend to more inputs or tasks than working memory and attention can handle at once.

Context Anchor

Seen in flight instruction and task management, especially during busy moments such as radio calls, checklist use, aircraft control, and traffic scanning happening together.