Prologue A seriously injured sailor lay crying in agony after falling down a deck hatch. Suffering from severe concussion, and multiple fractures, he lay awkwardly, deep inside his boat, wedged between engine and fishing machinery. It was the job of the helicopter rescue swimmer to work out how to remove him to a place ofContinueContinue reading “Ready for anything? Non-technical skills in helicopter operations”
Category Archives: 2023
What makes you good at what you do?
Lloyd Horgan Photography “Are you good at your job?” “What makes you good at what you do?” Presenting a briefing with the title “Are we good at what we do?,” I recently asked these questions to a group of around twenty-five professional aircrew. Of course almost all of us think we are good at whatContinueContinue reading “What makes you good at what you do?”
Hindsight: blessing or curse?
Have you ever read an accident report, had an incident related to you, or sat through a CRM case study that made you say out loud something like:
“What were they thinking?” “Why on earth did they decide to do that?” “How could they not have known?” “They must have seen that coming, surely?”
If you have – and we all have – then you have fallen victim to probably the most powerful and omnipresent psychological bias out there: the hindsight bias.
Hovering over the hill: are helicopter crews getting older?
Earlier this year I collected data from a survey of the global helicopter community as part of a study into non-technical skills in helicopter operations. The phenomenal response to this survey from over five hundred participants produced a rich dataset which includes a contemporary demographic snapshot of the helicopter industry worldwide. After just a cursoryContinueContinue reading “Hovering over the hill: are helicopter crews getting older?”
A very normal accident
It was early evening on the 24th September 2022 when an offshore AW139 helicopter inbound to Houma-Terrebonne Airport in Louisiana, USA, declared a mayday. A lot had already happened in the cockpit by the time the co-pilot hit the press to transmit…
We take a look at Normal Accident theory in the light of a recent accident: Technology is both a risk control and a hazard itself. The act of adding technology is at best risk neutral. Continually adding more technology in the belief that we are adding more layers of defence in a system is flawed because we are in fact adding more combinations of possible failure modes. In other words, there is a direct trade- off between increasing safety by adding in more controls, and decreasing safety by adding complexity.
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