Figure 2: The aviation and aerospace industry requires abundant manuals and procedures
Aviation safety agencies are responsible for
regulating mandatory ‘Human Factors’ requirement
programmes for all relevant organisations to
reduce human error, ensure continuing safety and
develop the best methods and cost controls. This
article looks at a few human-factors challenges
faced in the aviation industry.
Documentation & Procedures: Technical
documentation and procedures are a huge
challenge for everyone. It is the number one
reason that leads to any action taken against
aviation maintenance technicians, mechanics,
maintenance repair overhaul (MRO), general
aviation and manufacturing organisations.
The challenge is to keep things up-to-date
and continuously ensure that instructions are
compatible for all situations, tasks, employees
and environments.
Worker Fatigue: Fatigue ranks as the second
largest risk to safe work. Work related to
aviation involves a lot of night and early morning
tasks. The combination of insufficient rest, long
working hours, pressure and middle of the night
maintenance activities has a significant impact
on worker performance. A huge percentage of
accidents in aviation are caused by fatigue.
Safety culture: The two words, safety culture
are easy to say but represent attitude and
programmes that require significant corporate
and individual worker commitment. It is
characterised by shared values in the importance
of safety and the ability of every worker to
ar ticulate, understand and per form their
individual actions to ensure safety.
Figure 3: Fatigued employees may cause huge
disasters in the aviation industry.
Event reporting data: Many performance
indicators such as quality of take-off, approach
and landing procedures, training, crew pairings,
engines, AC systems, vibration, fuel flow and
many more are monitored. Even with all this data,
it is difficult to fully identify and understand the
contributing factors of a maintenance discrepancy.
For maintenance performance, human generated
event reports are better than automated data
collection.
Return of investment: Senior executives typically
invest in material or services that will improve
the bottom line. To put safety as the priority, all
staff must demonstrate that safety interventions
not only improve quality and safety but also lower
costs.
Establish ‘Human Factors’ as a priority: There
is a wide range of attitudes concerning human
factors in organisations, which includes leadership
39