CT26 MANAGING THE HUMAN FACTOR

Abstract

Flying a commercial aircraft is sometimes referred to as being 95% sheer boredom and 5% sheer terror. The safety record of modern airliners is dramatic. In 2006 there was one fatal accident for every 2.6 million departures. To put this in perspective: there were 65 departures every 60 seconds during that year; and one fatal accident every 28 days. While progress continues to be made on both the technical and human issues involved with aircraft design and operation, recent accidents, such as Swissair 111, have shown how rapidly a situation can progress from uncertainly to alarm to critical.In the last 10 years the number of airlines in the world flying western‐built jets has increased by 46% (674 to 990), the number of flights has increased by 49%, the number of fatal accidents (hull losses) has decreased by 36% and the number of ‘near‐misses’ has increased by 85%. These statistics suggest that major gains have been made in the area of human factors training given that the aircraft designs achieved a very high level of reliability some time ago.Human factors training in aviation is now focused on the management of ‘threats’ and ‘errors’. This presentation will review this training philosophy and consider parallels for the medical environment.