Human Factors

                                                  Human Factors: Crew Resource Management 

    Going through an aviation focused career you will always hear about CRM. CRM is the number one tool that aviators use to avoid a mishap that could happen solely from user error. The AMT handbook describes human factors as "multidisciplinary fields incorporating contributions from psychology, engineering, industrial design, statistics, operations research, and anthropometry." (page 14-3, What is human factors). From what I understand from my aviation career, human factors are anything going on outside, or inside of the aircraft that could cause distraction while operating. A report from Boeing states that "70 percent of commercial hull-loss incidents are primarily caused by human factors." (opening paragraph). 

    If you are in military service and go through a CRM course, chances are you've seen or heard of the swiss cheese chart. The swiss cheese chart is probably the number one takeaway I always have whenever I go through the annual course. It describes the causation of an accident step-by-step from big to small. The point of the swiss cheese is to show that there are many ways to stop an accident, however if the holes in the swiss cheese line up then an accident will occur.  Flight Blog: RUSH SYNDROME

                                                                            Story time

    On one of my first ever operational flights, CRM came into effect for my crew. We had been flying a few long nights in a row (8-9 hour flights), and the A-10's we were working with were flying quite dangerously. The A-10's had been simulating dropping munitions over top of us, as well as actually flying within 300 feet of us. Also in the stack a few other air players kept radios hot for awhile, causing major chaos and terrible situational awareness. My pilot got task saturated and stopped responding to everyone on our crew. The pilot quickly started delegating tasks so he could gather himself and get back into the fight. Without doing this I thought an accident would surely happen. However, using good CRM we avoided anything serious and got through the night without a mishap.



                                                                           References 

Swiss cheese model

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3E12wxM_DnKu9uqKEVkhiR6aeMz_Rsvku1gUgBuZYlIu4yzeZByDTiJXZ7N7TRRRRYfh4EPfkm2WGmSYRTTBGCfQjIYNE4qV_gqtwU1u95bA8lS_cri5PF3BVVD_qNqTi9agTV2sYQDA/s1600/pre-flight.gif

AMT handbook

https://www.faasafety.gov/files/gslac/courses/content/258/1097/AMT_Handbook_Addendum_Human_Factors.pdf

Boeing human factors

https://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_08/human_textonly.html

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