Homework Question on Cause of Accidents in Aviation
- Explore a contemporary issue in Flight Physiology and produce a Literature Review to discuss the subject.
- Here are a few examples:
- GermanWings crash and mental illness within Pilots
- Psychological and social impact of flight on crew
- Colour blindness in pilots – recent events
- Fatigue reporting systems
- Ageing and flying
- Cognitive overload Radiation
- You need to search the literature for information on your chosen subject.
- Use peer reviewed research articles but also newspaper articles or flying journals to source your information.
- You may want to ask for personal opinions from pilots, flight crew, medical experts etc.
Homework Answer on Cause of Accidents in Aviation
Introduction
It is an obvious thing to say that accidents occur most of the time in all areas of life, and that human errors are responsible for most of them. Petersen claims that human error underlies all accidents (1996). It is therefore important to understand the roles of human operators in order to improve performance and reduce the potential of occurrence of an accident. This paper is a review of literature with regard to the analysis of human error, stress and workload, and how they influence how the human operator, as well as their relationship to accidents. The literature review almost entirely focuses on pilot error.
Accidents and Human Error
The fact that several definitions for human error have been proposed implies that there is no single comprehensive definition of the same. Human error was defined by McCormick and Sanders as an undesirable or inappropriate human behavior or decision that reduces, or has the potential to reduce safety, system performance, or effectiveness (1993). Most researches in human error are in agreement with the sequential theory of causation of accident (Wiegmann & Shappell, 2001).
Until recently, human error was considered a description of operator error. Today, the domain of human error has been enlarged to include errors committed by non-operator humans: maintainers, managers and system designers, among others. In an attempt to provide the insight necessary for the prevention of human errors, several classification schemes of human error have been proposed. One that suggests four types of taxonomy was proposed by Senders and Moray (1991).