Written by Source: Kirsty Kiernan in Forbes Magazine.
This article from 2019 and published by Forbes, looks at the airline industry and discusses the value in not only studying what pilots do wrong, but also what they do right. The author, Kirsty Kiernan is a professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. She teaches and conducts research in unmanned systems and aviation safety.
The industry knows a lot about what pilots do wrong, but not nearly enough about what pilots do right. How does the role of the human in the system build in resilience?
‘In aviation safety, it’s like we’ve been trying to learn about marriage by only studying divorce.’
Jon Holbrook, a cognitive scientist in the Crew Systems and Aviation Operations Branch at NASA’s Langley Research Center, is leading a team that is studying routine performance, and the ways in which people actively contribute to creating safety in complex systems. Holbrook started this project when he realized that many people believed that since 80% of aviation accidents are caused by human error, removing the human would result in an 80% decrease in accidents. However, “for every well-scrutinized accident, there are literally millions of flights in which things go right, and those flights receive very little attention,” Holbrook said.