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Applied Human Factors In Aviation Maintenance: A Practical Guide To Improving Safety

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"Applied Human Factors in Aviation Maintenance" is an excellent book on human factors in aviation maintenance. Safety is the number one priority in the aviation industry. To improve safety levels, attention has traditionally been focused on improving equipment, techniques and regulations. However, safety has not improved much and is getting worse with the increase in traffic. Although there has been attention to human factor considerations with respect to performance of flight crew and air traffic controllers, consideration of human factors issues directed at aircraft maintenance personnel who inspect and repair aircraft, has not received as much attention, even though maintenance related incidents and accidents are a significant proportion of the total. That is why this book is welcome as it focuses on an area that is very critical to the improvement of safety in the aviation industry.

Human error continues to plague civil aviation. There has traditionally been a tendency to take a simplistic approach and write off aviation mishaps as being caused by "aircrew error". It is well established that mishaps cannot be attributed to a single cause, or in most instances, even a single individual. Rather, accidents are the end result of a myriad of latent and active failures, only the last of which are the unsafe acts of the aircrew. It is necessary to identify these active and latent failures in order to understand why the mishap occurred and how it might be prevented from happening again in the future.

Active failures are the actions or inactions of operators that are believed to cause the accident. These can arise from "pilot error", or "maintenance error", among others, and they are the last "unsafe acts" committed by aircrew or maintenance personnel, often with immediate and tragic consequences. For example, forgetting to lower the landing gear before touch down will yield relatively immediate, and potentially grave, consequences.

In contrast, latent failures are errors committed by individuals within the working areas or elsewhere in the supervisory chain of command that affect the tragic sequence of events characteristic of an accident. For example, letting someone work for say 24 hours without rest, can lead to fatigue and ultimately errors (active failures) in the maintenance department. Viewed from this perspective then, the unsafe acts of aircraft maintenance personnel are the end result of a long chain of causes whose roots originate in other parts (often the upper echelons) of the organization. The problem is that these latent failures may lie dormant or undetected for hours, days, weeks, or longer until one day they bite the unsuspecting aircrew or maintainer.

This is an excellent book that is recommended for all aviation maintenance personnel, regulators and aeronautical engineering students.