Human error now principal threat to flight safety

27 Oct 2011

Doug Nancarrow

One speaker at Safeskies this week suggested that rule fragmentation in airworthiness regulations is blocking advancement in air safety.

Dr Don Harris, managing director of HR Solutions in the UK, emphasised that an holistic approach to human factors is essential to improving safety.

These are some of the main points he made yesterday:

The actual accident rate has remained pretty much constant at one per a million departures for the last 20 years or so.
Why is the accident rate not decreasing? Is it just noise in the system? Can we not go any further?
Human error is the principal threat to flight safety. In over 80 per cent of incidents the crew has been identified as a causal factor and in 66 per cent of incident the crew were implicated as the primary causal factor.
Why are these numbers so big? Because the engineering of the system is so reliable now. The engineers have removed most of the main problems, so the only bit left is the human factors.
Both pilot workload and error are products of complex interactions between elements in the system.
You have to do good human factors design on the flight deck. You have to make your systems error proof and error tolerant as far as practical.
Regulations tend to inhibit rather than help.