Human Error In Airline Safety

The airline safety has been extensively researched in recent studies; according to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the reason that will cause the traffic control missed-approach procedure is not the poor equipment about the flight control authorities, but it is attributed to the “human error”.

There are three ways cause commonly in the case of control:

1. About 70%-74% of the mishaps occur in the low and medium amount of the traffic conditions

2. About 45% of the mishaps occur in the first 15 minutes on position

3. About 62% of the mishaps occur in the controller who lack of the experience within 6 years.

So the nature of human is being mistake, and it is not possible to reach the best conditions.

In the last decades, due to

Rasmussen (1983) has investigated the human behaviors and divided into 3 ranking: skill-based behavior, rule-based behavior, and Knowledge-based behavior, it also called Skill Rule Knowledge (SRK)

Based on the SRK theory, general error model, introduced by Reason (1990) as a way of evaluating the human errors, now has some fields of application in plenty of industries.

He proposed the 3 types of general error model: skill based error, rule based error, and knowledge based error.

1. Skill based error

It is not an intentional or negligent behavior during the work and it is commonly happening in the routine works. Such errors are negligence and forgotten.

Negligence is an action that will cause the attention deficiency, and the memory failure will lead to forgotten, both of them are explicit error. The main cause that bring about the implement error or procedure error are in an unknown, unawareness condition and having a hard burden of the Physiological and psychological

Scales Theory

It also called “The Scale Theory of Aviation Risk Management”, it means the airline companies and the airport take the two operations as the main business objectives, the resource that may be used by the operator are deemed to be “scale”, and how the operator use the limited resources to make the most effective distribution in order to balance the scale depend on how the management department of the airline companies and the airport take the risk cleverly or not

Therefore, airline companies and the airport implement the objectives and allocate the resource must take the two objective of the profit and flight safety into consideration and to achieve the balance of the two.

1.2 The reason that will cause air crash

In airline safety, from the statistics of the Aviation Investigation Council, Executive Yuan, more than 70% that will influence the air crash is human factors, 20% is caused by the technical factors, 10% is caused by other factors. In 2005, International Air Transportation Association (IATA) indicates that in their safety report, there are five ways that will influence the air