For the rest of the day, I continued my literature review, focusing on human factors such as pilot age and simple human error. At the end of the day, I read an interesting article (Safety Practices, Training Practices and CRM: A Midpoint Perspective) that introduced the concept of crew resource management (CRM) to me. The author of the article, Daniel Maurino, made several interesting points about the flaws in how we evaluate aviation accidents. He made the analogy that accident investigation is the "postmortem of the system conducted after the point of no return....there is not much that can be done about it, other than organizing a funeral." It's similar to the thought that I have in the back of my head reading these accident reports, "Yes we will be able to identify the causes of this accident, but how much good are we really doing to prevent similar accidents in the future? Do the suggestions that the NTSB make actually help improve safety?
I appreciate his acknowledgement that human error is unavoidable, and he goes on to detail how the accident investigation process is flawed, because it doesn't investigate the "systemic and organizational" issues that lead to these errors. This article will prove extremely useful for my risk mitigation module, as it really opened my eyes to the issues of accident investigations. Most importantly, he makes sincere attempts and suggestions of ways that the training and monitoring ("surveillance" as he calls it) process can be improved to make the aviation world a safer place.
Tomorrow I will continue my literature review and possibly get started on the Powerpoint.
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