Human Error In Aviation

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In today’s aviation world, aircraft are designed with multiple systems to aid aircrew with all aspects of flight; however, the only factor that aircraft manufacturers can’t eliminate is the integration of human error. “Human errors represent the mental or physical activities of individuals that fail to achieve their intended outcome”*. In order to properly predict human error factors we must first understand some factors that make up human error, such as “fatigue” and “situational stress”. Stress can manifest a multitude of symptoms that are detrimental to the operational tempo and the safety of passengers & flight crew in commercial aviation. People experience stress in a plethora of ways, but generally for most people these stressors …show more content…
Inclement weather induced stress on the crew of flight 1420 causing them to expedite the landing. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) mentioned in their accident report that flight crews operating under stressful conditions have demonstrated a resistance to changing their original plan until overwhelming data is present justifying another course of action. Consequently, upon reviewing the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) data, it was determined that the flight crew failed to re-negotiate their original plan of expediting the landing of flight 1420 due to inclement weather approaching. Despite several notifications of the deteriorating weather conditions, the flight crew failed to divert to a neighboring airport which leads one to think if there was more than just the stressors of …show more content…
The HFACS model is a four-tiered model comprised of organizational influences, unsafe supervision, preconditions for unsafe acts, and unsafe acts used to deduce the various causes of human error. Starting with organizational influences we could hypothesize that there could be an organizational climate that garnered a competitive atmosphere amongst fellow flight crew members, which could have led to supervision, being previous flight crew members, failing to correct these competitive rivalries. The other factor needed to induce an unsafe act would be our “preconditions” that were clearly evident with inclement weather, and a heightened sense of stress which affected the crews mental state. With these conditions present the model was complete enabling the crew to become susceptive to decision errors, skill-based errors, and perceptual

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