Notes from the Eleventh International Symposium on ...



Notes from the Eleventh International Symposium on Aviation Psychology, March 5 – 8 2001

Kurt Barnhart

This symposium was an excellent experience for anyone with an interest in aviation safety. It was a great place to make contacts and to become educated about cutting edge research in human factors. Much exciting work is being done with the potential of revolutionizing the way we approach the art of managing air transportation- from all perspectives.

The symposium began with two half day workshops on Monday. The first I attended was “A Human Factors Approach to Accident Investigation” where Dr’s. Scott Shappell and Doug Weigmann discussed their HFACS system- Human Factors Accident Classification System. The system allows for the electronic codification of accident causal data into a format similar to James Reason’s famous Swiss cheese cheese which allows for a more clear determination of “why” accidents occur as opposed to just the “what happened.” Notes from this presentation are on file.

The afternoon workshop was Captain Bob Besco’s workshop on “Methodologies for Teaching Professional Airmanship: What to Teach and How to Teach it” In this session we went over Besco’s list of 12 things all good pilots do. Bob’s humorous tongue-in-cheek style coupled with his years of experience as an American Airlines Captain made for an interesting and insightful presentation on what we should ingrain into all aviators. Notes are available for this session as well.

Monday evening was a poster session and reception for additional research not presented in the conference. I talked a bit with Julie Harkey who had a poster outlining research she had done on air rage. Most topics centered on fatigue research, age factors, etc. Research will be available on request.

The conference opening session was Tuesday morning with a keynote by Dr. Chris Wickens of the University of Illinois which discussed the importance of continuing research into error tolerant systems. Tuesday sessions I attended were Predictors of Accidents, Cockpit Automation, and a session on cockpit communication. In the accident prediction session we learned how accident prone pilots can be predicted with greater than 70% accuracy using such indicators as life stress/anxiety, concentration ability, general frustration level, as well as recency/type of experience.

The session on cockpit automation focused attention on the fact that many pilots are still not comfortable with high levels of automation in the cockpit, even the younger pilots. Airline pilots- mainly on the airbus are very unfamiliar with many of the capabilities of the automation due to lack of sufficient training (in the sim.) and the infrequency with which they use many of the features. It has been discovered that there is a real lack of a genuine conceptual understanding of how the automation functions. While it has been determined that many trainees come with an understanding of light aircraft basics, training isn’t focusing enough on the conceptual understanding associated with automation. Pilots still don’t really know why the aircraft is behaving as it does. This is mainly present in the managed descent phase where the automation adjusts pitch, power, and aircraft configuration, often times counter-intuitively for pilots not used to automation. It was noted that many times pilots will have the wrong mode selected and not understand why the aircraft doesn’t behave the way they expect. Mode awareness was the subject of much debate.

The last session Tuesday focused on crew communication and effective challenge strategies for first officers. Research was presented on captain/FO preferred communication styles. Interesting methodologies for how to train pilots to bring errors to the other’s attention without destroying the team atmosphere were presented.

The first session Wednesday was on CRM Training where a framework for error tolerant team decision making was presented. In this session it was brought out that social interactions account for more accidents than does a single “human error.” It was brought out here that many training activities have outpaced student basic student’s understanding. Strategies for Crew-ATC integration were discussed as well. One of the biggest concerns was the fact that in flight training today we are not “bridging” well enough from the commercial/flight instructor certificates to the ATP airline crew environment. They mentioned the tremendous variation in the quality of training. We often aren’t binding judgment and decision making by a common theoretical framework in flight training.

The session on Threat management was Chaired by Dr. Bob Helmreich, a famous human factors researcher who discussed the Line Operations Safety Audit procedure and how that is helping researchers understand “why” accidents are happening by putting trained observer/researchers into the cockpit during actual line operations and completing a structured evaluation of the flight. These audits have found that at least 64% of flights have at least one egregious error and only 20% of these errors are effectively managed. Of these remaining 80%, only 28% are handled effectively. It was put fourth that pilots who intentionally violate rules habitually are twice as unsafe as those who don’t. There was a paper on airline safety culture and it was determined that when pilots perceived a genuine commitment to safety on the part of management, they are much less likely to make mistakes which lead to accidents. It was determined that there was much more variability within airlines than between airlines concerning perceived safety culture suggesting that that there are a few pilots at each airline with bad attitudes and we should focus on weeding these (most often intentional violators) unsafe pilots out. It was determined that pilots who had a poor attitude towards their airline’s safety culture caught only 14% of their errors while those pilots with a positive attitude caught fully 50% of their errors. Of the poor attitude pilots, 50% of their errors led to undesirable consequences while only 9% of the errors made by pilots with a positive attitude were significantly consequential. 47% of the poor attitude pilots had errors which led to other errors while only 5% of the good attitude pilots had errors which led to others. There is much more to share here but I’ll refer you to the research.

There were other presentations on CRM and how it has evolved into now it’s 6th generation and what the differences have been and where CRM is going in the future. There was a presentation on teaching effective error management strategies. There was a presentation on Free Flight and it is astonishing to realize that it will be upon us in two years. How many of us are aware of the operational changes which will result for the enroute environment? They are definitely significant and although the presentation didn’t get into the specifics of what to teach pilots, it did address it from an ATC standpoint and the fact that more research needs to be done in order to determine how controllers can best manage the “dynamic resectorization” which will occur with Free Flight. There was also a presentation on DAG-TM- Distributed Air-Ground Traffic Management and how that will effect pilot-controller relations in the future.

The final session I attended was on pilot education and most of the research focused on how fast low time pilots are moving to the airlines with alarmingly low experience. For instance, one presenter had a student who made captain within 6 months of flying with a regional airline and that pilot had only a few hundred hours of GA experience going in. He mentioned how this pilot hadn’t even experienced all of the seasons of the year as an airline pilot and was already a captain. He said this person showed up for a flight and the aircraft needed to be de-iced and he was responsible for getting it done and the only experience he had with it was reading about a paragraph in the manual during his initial training. His captain upgrade training consisted of sitting through the initial-hire ground school course again for some systems brush up and about an hour of one-on-one instruction on captain procedures.

In another session it was suggested that all new pilots be given a supervised reading list in their coursework since the first 1,000 hours of flight time is much more important than it used to be given the hire rate (something we’ve discussed before).

There is much else to share which I’ll be able to do when I get the proceedings sometime in June. These are just notes that I was able to glean on the fly.

Kurt

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