Human Factors in Aircraft Maintenance

Demetris Yiannakides, Charalampos Sergiou

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000709025
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Transportation Industry
• Index: Business

This book provides an in-depth analysis of human failure and its various forms and root causes. The analysis is developed through real aviation accidents and incidents and the deriving lessons learned.

Features:

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• Employs accumulated experience, and the scientific and research point of view, and recorded aviation accidents and incidents from the daily working environment

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• Provides lessons learned and integrates the existing regulations into the human factors discipline

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• Highlights the responsibility concerns and raises the accountability issues deriving from the engineers' profession by concisely distinguishing human failure types

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• Suggests a new approach in human factors training in order to meet current and future challenges imposed on aviation maintenance

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• Offers a holistic approach in human factors aircraft maintenance

Human Factors in Aircraft Maintenance is comprehensive, easy to read, and can be used as both a training and a reference guide for operators, regulators, auditors, researchers, academics, and aviation enthusiasts. It presents the opportunity for aircraft engineers, aviation safety officers, and psychologists to rethink their current training programs and examine the pros and cons of employing this new approach.

1 Introduction

Air transportation emerged in the middle of the last century as the latest mode of public transportation (Dempsey et al. 1997) and since then has been experiencing continuous growth. Its driving powers have been the remarkable evolution of technology, the strong resilience of the industry promising a sustainable future (IATA 2018b; Macário et al., 2009) against any global economic downturns (Goyal and Negi 2014; European Parliament 2009), the unprecedented safety performance (Boeing 2017a; Airbus 2018) and the public’s constant loyalty to air transportation (IATA 2018b). Now more than ever, the industry is characterized by fierce competition and a vast demand for time aircraft utilization, which inevitably generates conditions that drive human capabilities and performance to the edge. Aircraft maintenance is an integral part of the aviation system that experiences the direct implications of the enlargement of the industry. In effect, aircraft engineers frequently work under harsh conditions to the utmost of their physiology and mental capacity by undertaking tasks in complex systems under accumulated workload and pressure, knowing that a single error may deny the delivery of an airworthy aircraft.

At the same time, it is of no surprise that the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), national authorities and other competent aviation agencies, having examined the lessons learned from recent research studies and accident/incident investigation reports, continue to identify human factors as the most frequent, primary causal factor and/or the main contributor to aviation accidents and incidents (CAA UK 2015; CASA Australia 2013). Statistics show that about 70–80 percent of all aviation accidents across the globe are caused by human error, the pilot error problem having a higher profile. Some 20 percent of these errors are estimated to occur due to maintenance activities that may contain either failed components and/or components involved in procedures that do not comply with regulations, policies and processes (Boeing 2013). Consequently, authorities, in an effort to raise the awareness of the industry regarding the implications of human failure in aviation safety and to avoid complacency have issued regulations imposing a compulsory theoretical module in human factors during the initial training of maintenance engineers, training that regularly repeats during the course of their career in the aviation industry (EU Commission Regulation 2014; CASA Australia 1998–2018; Civil Aviation Administration of China 2005). Identically, they have issued recommendations and non-mandatory advisory circulars for human factors training (FAA 2017) or have introduced standard apprenticeship (Ministry of Civil Aviation of India 2016) within the maintenance organizations, amid open discussions for integrating human factors training in the existing regulation frameworks, to ensure the delivery of competent, skilled and safe personnel (Johnson 2018).

Fundamentally, human factors science incorporates the fields of psychology, physiology, sociology, engineering, industrial design, statistics, operations research and anthropometry, and provides an understanding of the impact of human limitations over human performance. To this end, human factors examine the relationship between the people and the components of the systems in terms of interoperability and consistency. Ultimately, the acquired knowledge, once complemented with the ability to recognize and master the dangers that stem from human behavior, may act as the enabler towards the mitigation of human failure and the design of error tolerant and more resilient systems. Notably, the Aviation European Human Factors Advisory Group (EHFAG) in its European Strategy for Human Factors in Aviation suggests that training in human factors considers error as a symptom of systemic and organizational issues, with multiple factors involved that affect human performance (2012).

Human factors knowledge not only enhances human performance and facilitates error mitigation but contributes to the goal of creating and reinforcing a safety culture within organizations where employees practice safe habits (FAA 2014). The UK’s Health and Safety Executive (HSE) defines safety culture as the product of individual and group values, attitudes, perceptions, competencies and patterns of behavior that determine the commitment to safety (1993). To this end, organizations promote safety culture by considering their inherent safety values, leadership strategies, employee attitudes and behaviors (Salas and Maurino 2010; Patterson 2002). Existing efforts converge in integrating safety culture into corporate culture through the application of safety models and safety management systems (ICAO 2018). Indisputably, safety culture is captured very high within the taxonomy of safety drivers and remains a significant feature that should characterize every organization functioning in the aviation industry.

Concurrently, the forecasts of major aircraft manufacturers (Boeing 2017b; Airbus 2017), as a well as those of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO 2017), reveal that industry should not be left in complacency, since they expect that the world commercial fleet will more than double over the next 20 years. Boeing estimates that demand in the commercial market for jet airplanes will nearly double to 47,000 airplanes, at an average annual growth rate of 3.3 percent. The same is true for Airbus, who forecasts a demand for 34,900 aircraft. Amazingly, more than 600,000 aircraft engineers will need to be trained at the highest levels (Boeing 2017a) and employed in the industry until 2036.

It is indeed worrying that the estimated enlargement of the industry and the consequent tremendous need for aircraft engineers comes with significant industry complaints, that even though human factors are being gradually integrated into safety cultures and safety management systems incidents manifesting human errors still occur. An aggravating factor is also the findings of studies that expect a labor shortage in the maintenance technician field in the coming years, with the most alarming finding to be the problem of skills shortage of the new engineers employed in aircraft maintenance (Lewis 2012; Karlsson 2007; US Government Accountability Office 2014).

It is the view of the authors that the training organizations in their effort to satisfy the demand for aircraft engineers, and due to the fact that the current training system is not as standardized as it should be, allowing for variations in the quality of the delivered training will inevitably have a significant negative impact on the skills of the new engineers. The shortfalls and the potential implications in aircraft maintenance converge on the view that the aviation community must strive for lasting solutions to face the challenges. It is therefore suggested that collective efforts should focus on the entire current initial training of engineers and the relevant curricula and training methodologies.

A significant pitfall under the existing training is that at the initial training, there is not a structured methodology in teaching human factors within the working environment, a methodology capable of enhancing situational awareness and practicing advanced skill behavior techniques when dealing with multitasks and complex systems. Engineers engage in developing safety culture, initially within a mature working environment (part 145/M-station or base repair organisations), which needs to deliver airworthy aircraft under significant stressors such as time pressure and heavy workload and where there is no opportunity for exercising, planning or practicing different scenarios and techniques. The second and equally important parameter is the fact that the key front-line personnel usually perceive safety culture as a gospel of regulations required to be implemented as a checklist. In addition, the fact should not be missed that top-level managers responsible for promoting a safety culture within organizations by improving behaviors and attitudes do not necessarily possess a sound understanding of safety culture themselves. Another reason is the existing confusion that surrounds the concepts of safety culture and health and safety rules. It is a requirement that this relationship should be entirely distinct.

In that sense, we propose that safety attitudes, improved skills, valued performance and the foundations of safety culture can be better adopted and built during the initial training of the aircraft engineers within the training institutions and organizations. At initial training where “fermentation” takes place, instructors should be obliged by the training system to simulate the harsh conditions of the “true” working environment with sufficient realism and vaccinate young engineers with the values of safety culture. At this very important learning stage, as Bainbridge suggests, “all the expertise of psychology learning […] could be included […] any type of behavior and any mode of cognitive processing can be skilled” (1999). This long-lasting positive attitude that will be consciously acquired through knowledge and practice and further enriched by increasing experience could be used as a predictive tool of human behavior over a task and positively influence the already established maintenance teams (Choi and Levine 2004) without being dependent on other endogenous and exogenous factors or rely on the situation.

The proposed training approach is holistic and takes into account the theory of human factors as well as the specificities of the character, the personality and the national culture of each young aircraft engineer. As Depaolo and Mclaren suggest, by improving an individual’s attitude we also increase human learning ability (2006), which is a plus to the common understanding of human failure and risk management strategies, which in today’s approach remains mainly theoretical. In effect, the results of the new approach should satisfy the needs of the industry and also fortify the efforts of the aviation authorities and maintenance organizations. The goal is to eliminate unsafe actions and risky behaviors that inevitably harm personnel’s health and jeopardize flight safety. Such unsafe behaviors cannot be the rule but the absolute exception.

1.1 The Need to Take Human Factors into Account: A Historical Perspective

From the origins of air transport to the present day, the perception that prevailed, as well as the methodology used to ensure safety, has undergone considerable variations due to the evolution of air transport itself. Its determinant factor has been the aftermath of accidents and the introduction of innovative investigation techniques, which gradually revealed the overall sequence of causal factors and demonstrated the need for effective and revolutionary mitigation measures. As it is shown in Figure 1.1, the evolution in aviation safety thinking can be divided into four consecutive eras (ICAO 2018):

• The technical era: this lasted from the beginning of public air transportation until the late 1960s. Safety occurrences were initially related to technical and technological failures, therefore safety endeavors focused in improving those areas. Efforts were successful since by the 1950s the frequency of accidents had gradually declined and safety processes had considered mainly regulatory compliance and oversight.

• The human factors era: this was developed from the early 1970s until the mid-1990s. Although in those days the frequency of aviation accidents was significantly reduced and aviation became a safer mode of transportation due to the investments in technology improvements, several inconceivable accidents, unrelated to systems’ design failure, switched investigators’ interest to human performance. Safety endeavors incorporated multiple factors having the potential to affect behavior and acknowledged that aviators operate in a complex environment.

• The organizational era: the organizational era began in the mid-1990s. In fact, safety thinking encompassed also the organizational factors that might potentially jeopardize safety, in addition to the already human and technical factors on board. The dominant elements that were considered were the impact of organizational culture and policies and the importance and effectiveness of safety risk controls.

• The total system era: this was introduced from the beginning of the century. Nowadays, both safety agencies and organizations, on either a mandatory or voluntary basis, are following a holistic approach in safety, which integrates all the elements that have been found to play an important role in safety during its evolution. In that event, they implement a safety management system (SMS), which starts from the management and is driven by the routine collection and analysis of safety data. It includes the identification of the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Human Performance and Limitations
• Chapter 3 Social Psychology
• Chapter 4 Factors Affecting Performance
• Chapter 5 Physical Environment, Tasks and Hazards in the Workplace
• Chapter 6 Communication
• Chapter 7 Human Error
• Chapter 8 An Enhanced Approach in Basic Aircraft Maintenance Training Focusing on Human Factors
• Index