Written by SOURCE: www.competentaviators.com
This article by Alex Pollitt recounts a serious inflight emergency involving an offshore AW139 helicopter that declared a mayday after multiple, interacting failures, including smoke in the cockpit, loss of control inputs, engine overspeed and confusing indications.
Rather than framing it as an extraordinary event, the author draws on Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents idea to argue that in highly complex systems like modern aircraft, unexpected interactions between failures are inevitable. Because of the “interactive complexity” of such systems, no design or risk assessment could anticipate every possible combination of failures.
Thought provoking from both the perspective of Threat and Error Management, and the role of the human in both contributing to, and avoiding or mitigating accidents, the piece concludes that human operators remain essential for managing unanticipated situations, since their ability to react in real time cannot yet be replaced by engineered systems.
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