"IT IS HUMAN TO ERR" FIXING THE HUMAN ERROR PROBLEM

The majority of aircraft accidents are due to some type of error of the pilot. This fact has been true in the past and, unfortunately, most probably will be true in the future.

— Hugh Harrison Hurt, Jr., in the preface of his book 'Aerodynamics For Naval Aviators,' NAVWEPS 00-80T-80, August 1959.

This quote was written in 1959 and now, 50 years later, it still has the same meaning. Making mistakes is natural, we are not made to perform perfectly, even when we differentiate from animals and machines because of our rational thinking and learning, we cannot say that humans are error free. 70% of aircraft accidents are due to human error, whether in the design of the aircraft or the training of the pilot, the human element is always there. As Richard H. Wood says in his book Aviation Safety Programs, accidents are related more to the way the equipment is used than to the equipment itself. The truth is that things don't break by themselves, either we designed them in a way that they will break, we put them in the wrong place or we didn't give them the maintenance required and finally, we misused them.

An error occurs when a task element is:

• Not performed when required
• Performed when not required
• Performed incorrectly
• Performed out of sequence
• Performed late

According to FAA's Human Error and Commercial Aviation Accidents: A Comprehensive, Fine-Grained Analysis Using HFACS, the following are the Human Factors categories involved in commercial aviation accidents:

Organizational Influences

-Resource Management

-Organizational Climate

-Operational Process

Unsafe Supervision

-Inadequate Supervision

-Planned Inappropriate Operations

-Failed to Correct Known Problems

-Supervisory Violations

Preconditions of Unsafe Acts

-Environmental Conditions

-Technological Environment

-Physical Environment

-Conditions of the Operator

-Adverse Mental States

-Adverse Physiological States

-Physical/Mental Limitations

-Personnel Factors

-Crew Resource Management

-Personal Readiness

Unsafe Acts of the Operator

-Skill-based Errors

-Decision Errors

-Perceptual Errors

-Violations

If you want to read more, this is an extremely interesting and useful article for those involved in Human Factors.

http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA463865