Communicate Positively with your Passengers
Using good communication skills with your passengers can vastly improve satisfaction, and may even put anxious fliers at ease…. Continue Reading →
Words Than Can Be Hazardous To Your Health
Miscommunication arising from spoken interaction is a fact of life experienced, in one form or another, almost daily. Even two people speaking face-to-face, ostensibly in the same language, with a common background in the subject of the communication, frequently discover that what was meant was not what was understood. In casual discussion or routine business…… Continue Reading →
Decision Trees and Bowties
Sophisticated analytical tools are available to enhance decision making…. Continue Reading →
Decision Making
Decision making is the cognitive process of selecting a course of action from among multiple alternatives. The decision-making process produces a choice of action or an opinion that determines the decision maker's behavior and therefore has a profound influence on task performance. Decision making in an aeronautical environment involves any pertinent decision a pilot must…… Continue Reading →
Discipline in Aviation
This article defines discipline and illustrates its importance to safe flight operations. Its objective is to reinforce the importance of discipline as the foundation of airmanship and the need to follow procedures to ensure safe operations. The article also demonstrates that poor discipline is the direct result of attitudes that may lead a pilot to…… Continue Reading →
Monitoring Matters: Guidance on the Development of Pilot Monitoring Skills
Loss of Control is prioritized as the most important of the significant seven safety issues and the application of effective pilot monitoring is identified as a key safety net in the prevention of and recovery from Loss of Control accidents and incidents. Monitoring is an essential ingredient in achieving synergy with highly automated and complex…… Continue Reading →
Models of Threat Error and CRM in Flight Operations
Issues in Crew Resource Management (CRM) are discussed, including its definition and primary goals of recognizing and managing threat and error. CRM is a component of an organization’s safety efforts and must be driven by valid data on operational issues. Data requirements for a safety culture include proactive information on crew behavior. The use of…… Continue Reading →
Standard Operating Procedures Compliance
Adhering to standard operating procedures (SOPs) is a personal quality that can profoundly influence flight safety. This briefing note provides information every pilot should understand about the origin of SOPs and the critical importance of following them unfailingly during operations…. Continue Reading →
Situational Awareness
This article presents a definition of situational awareness. It explains the complex process of maintaining situational awareness, focuses on how it is lost and proposes prevention and recovery strategies. It is intended to help the reader gain and maintain situational awareness, to prevent falling into the traps associated with its loss and to avoid the…… Continue Reading →
Take-off performance calculation and entry errors – A global perspective
Everyday errors such as incorrectly transcribing or inadvertently dialling a wrong telephone number normally have minimal consequences. For high capacity aircraft operation, the consequence of such errors can be significant. There have been numerous take-off accidents worldwide that were the result of a simple data calculation or entry error by the flight crew. This report…… Continue Reading →
Threat & Error Management – How to understand it properly
Threat and error management (TEM) offers an intuitive and flexible approach to practical risk management. It has been originally developed by human factors researchers at the University of Texas (USA). The Threat and Error Management (TEM) model is a conceptual framework that assists in understanding, from an operational perspective, the inter-relationship between safety and human…… Continue Reading →
The Barn Door Effect
An article about pilots propensity to continue approaches to land when closer to convective weather than they would wish to get while en route… Continue Reading →
Threat and error management (TEM)
Threat and error management (TEM) is an overarching safety concept regarding aviation operations and human performance. TEM is not a revolutionary concept, but it evolved gradually, as a consequence of the constant drive to improve the margins of safety in aviation operations through the practical integration of Human Factors knowledge…. Continue Reading →
Threat and Error Management (TEM) in Air Traffic Control
The m a in objective of introducing the TEM framework to the Air Traffic Serv ices ( A TS) communit y in general, and the Air Traffic Control (ATC) co mm unit y in particular, is to enhance aviation safety and efficiency…. Continue Reading →
What Makes A Pilot Street Smart About Flying
By street smart, we mean: awareness of the essential aspects of flying; ability to know where and when to find critical information; ability to detect and compensate for the mistakes of others; ability to avoid the subtle traps and pitfalls found in the flying environment; and ability to complete a 30-year career without any accidents…… Continue Reading →