Human Factors In Aviation — hazardous attitudes
Aviation is filled with some of the most cutting edge technology on the planet. We have planes that can land themselves along with saving the pilot from making critical errors when making flight control inputs. So why do we still have plane crashes if we have this much technology at our finger tips? Well, the majority of all airplane crashes are due to human error. In this blog post I want to tell you about some hazardous attitudes the FAA has found that effect pilots working in both single resource management (SRM) and crew resource management (CRM) environments
The way I would define human factors within the aviation industry would be all of the elements that affect the crew on a psychological and physical level. The factors could include having a headache, or it being extremely hot in the flight deck. Within aviation the crew tries to mitigate these human factors as best as possible by doing a self check before even entering the plane. One area of focus that crews can overlook is hazardous attitudes. These attitudes can affect the most inexperienced pilots all the way up to career long airline pilots.
Here are 3 of the 5 attitudes the FAA defines as hazardous
- Anti-Authority
Pilots who fall into this attitude tend to think the rules don’t apply to them, or that their skill level means it’s okay to break the rules. This is simply a foolish way to think because the majority of federal aviation regulations (FARS)are written in blood.
2. Impulsivity
This attitude can be characterized as a pilot feeling the need to do something quickly in order to fix their error. This can be deadly because in order to asses the situation the pilot has to determine what the error is before acting. If they act to quickly they can run the risk of making the error even worse which can very well be fatal.
3. Invulnerability
Pilots who portray Invulnerability are at serious risk of making a critical error. The best way to describe this attitude would be “it wont happen to” The pilots who are most susceptible to experiencing this hazardous attitude would be very experienced pilots and very inexperienced pilots.
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Reference —
FAA. (2016). Aeronautical Decision-Making. Retrieved November 18, 2020, from https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/aviation/phak/media/04_phak_ch2.pdf
