I bring you a weekly bite-sized chunk of the science behind helicopter human factors and CRM in practice, simplifying the complex and distilling a helicopter related study into a summary of less than 500 words. This week: Workload in helicopter rescue operations – A comparison of two different rescue methods in a randomised cross-over design.
Category Archives: Crew Resource Management
H2F BITESIZE #27
I bring you a weekly bite-sized chunk of the science behind helicopter human factors and CRM in practice, simplifying the complex and distilling a helicopter related study into a summary of less than 500 words. This week: Crew Resource Management: What aviation can learn from the application of CRM in other domains
H2F BITESIZE #26
I bring you a weekly bite-sized chunk of the science behind helicopter human factors and CRM in practice, simplifying the complex and distilling a helicopter related study into a summary of less than 500 words. This week: Pilot see, pilot do: Examining the predictors of pilots’ risk management behaviour
H2F BITESIZE #25
I bring you a weekly bite-sized chunk of the science behind helicopter human factors and CRM in practice, simplifying the complex and distilling a helicopter related study into a summary of less than 500 words. This week: Emotions-based training: Enhancing aviation performance through self-awareness and mental preparation, coping with stress and emotions.
H2F BITESIZE #24
I bring you a weekly bite-sized chunk of the science behind helicopter human factors and CRM in practice, simplifying the complex and distilling a helicopter related study into a summary of less than 500 words. This week: Hero or Hazard: A systematic review of individual differences linked with reduced accident involvement and influencing success during emergencies.
H2F BITESIZE #23
I bring you a weekly bite-sized chunk of the science behind helicopter human factors and CRM in practice, simplifying the complex and distilling a helicopter related study into a summary of less than 500 words. This week: Exploring the role of pilot attributes and skills in response to in-flight emergencies.
Experience ≠ Judgement:
What one well conceived study tells us about how experience interacts with risk-taking and doesn’t always align with competence. Do traditionally used indicators of pilot competence, such as age, total flight hours, and recent flying experience, actually predict sound risk management behaviour?
H2F BITESIZE #22
I bring you a weekly bite-sized chunk of the science behind helicopter human factors and CRM in practice, simplifying the complex and distilling a helicopter related study into a summary of less than 500 words. This week: The Virtual Landing Pad: Facilitating rotary-wing landing operations in Degraded Visual Environments (DVE).
H2F BITESIZE #21
I bring you a weekly bite-sized chunk of the science behind helicopter human factors and CRM in practice, simplifying the complex and distilling a helicopter related study into a summary of less than 500 words. This week: Safety in high-risk helicopter operations: The role of additional crew in accident prevention.
H2F BITESIZE #20
I bring you a weekly bite-sized chunk of the science behind helicopter human factors and CRM in practice, simplifying the complex and distilling a helicopter related study into a summary of less than 500 words. This week: Resilience and brittleness in the offshore helicopter transportation system
H2F BITESIZE #19
I bring you a weekly bite-sized chunk of the science behind helicopter human factors and CRM in practice, simplifying the complex and distilling a helicopter related study into a summary of less than 500 words. This week: The potential of technologies to mitigate helicopter accident factors
H2F BITESIZE #18
I bring you a weekly bite-sized chunk of the science behind helicopter human factors and CRM in practice, simplifying the complex and distilling a helicopter related study into a summary of less than 500 words. This week: Impact of adverse weather on commercial helicopter pilot decision-making and standard operating procedures.
H2F BITESIZE #17
I bring you a weekly bite-sized chunk of the science behind helicopter human factors and CRM in practice, simplifying the complex and distilling a helicopter related study into a summary of less than 500 words. This week: The role of native English speakers in safe, efficient radiotelephony
H2F BITESIZE #16
I bring you a weekly bite-sized chunk of the science behind helicopter human factors and CRM in practice, simplifying the complex and distilling a helicopter related study into a summary of less than 500 words. This week: Distributed Cognition in Search and Rescue: Loosely coupled tasks and tightly coupled roles.
H2F BITESIZE #15
I bring you a weekly bite-sized chunk of the science behind helicopter human factors and CRM in practice, simplifying the complex and distilling a helicopter related study into a summary of less than 500 words. This week: Pilot Monitoring: Summary of Research and Applied Training Tools
Landing blind: from battlefield brownout to the civil cockpit
Technology may one day give us perfect vision through dust and snow. Until then, or as long as helicopters land on unprepared surfaces, brownout will remain a hazard in rotary-wing operations. Civil pilots cannot avoid it entirely, but they can manage it intelligently: Why discipline, teamwork, and training still trump technology in brownout
H2F BITESIZE #14
I bring you a weekly bite-sized chunk of the science behind helicopter human factors and CRM in practice, simplifying the complex and distilling a helicopter related study into a summary of less than 500 words. This week: The role of shared mental models in team coordination CRM skills of mutual performance monitoring and backup behaviors.
H2F BITESIZE #13
I bring you a weekly bite-sized chunk of the science behind helicopter human factors and CRM in practice, simplifying the complex and distilling a helicopter related study into a summary of less than 500 words. This week: Effects of Hydration on Cognitive Function of Pilots.
Creativity in the cockpit.
Can creative thinking help to mitigate the effects of operational unpredictability? Helicopter operations involve a high degree of unpredictability. A survey of helicopter crew has showed that a high proportion recognise the role that creativity plays in successfully managing uncertainty in flight operations.
Military vs Civil: Does training background affect safety in helicopter pilots?
Which system produces the better pilot – military or civil? Does it matter? According to a recent study of helicopter pilots from the University of Aberdeen with the title “Does training background affect safety in helicopter pilots?” (Kaminska et al., 2023), maybe we are right to be asking these questions. The answers suggest that we need to pay more attention to how the military-civil divide impacts CRM behaviours amongst mixed crews. What do the cultural differences embedded in the different ways these pilots have been trained mean to competency, operational effectiveness, and – ultimately – safety?
Sting in the tail: keeping the back end in the front of your mind.
It’s hard to believe that the AW169 tail rotor failure over Leicester City Football Club happened over five years ago. Following the accident in 2018 I was asked by my Head of Training at the time to focus some training for crews on tail rotor malfunctions which led me to CAA Paper 2003/1 Helicopter TailContinueContinue reading “Sting in the tail: keeping the back end in the front of your mind.”
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.
Does complacency really cause errors?
Attributing complacency as a cause of human error is as easy as it is lazy. Why?
The need for speed? How slowness has a value all of its own.
Human exploits in aviation have always been closely linked to our fascination for speed. We admire speed in its many guises and it remains a marker of achievement in almost any field you care to think of. In aviation, just as in many other walks of life, we often assume the faster the better. We associate speed with competence. But what if we could disassociate the idea of slowness with incompetence? What if instructors were made to teach the opposite? What if we came to associate a slow response with higher skill levels and greater professionalism?
Developing resilience to startle and surprise in helicopter operations
Also published in AirMed&Rescue April 2022 edition. https://www.airmedandrescue.com/latest/long-read/developing-resilience-helicopter-operations
What should startle and surprise training mean in an applied sense and how should we be approaching it? Do the differences between airline transport flight profiles and helicopter operations mean that we should be looking critically at how to approach the startle and surprise from a rotary wing perspective? Is it as significant a hazard in the low level, high workload, high obstacle environment in which helicopter crews spend much of their time?
The automation explosion: examining the human factor fallout
Also published in AirMed&Rescue, Nov 2021 edition.
Automation reduces workload, frees attentional resources to focus on other tasks, and is capable of flying the aircraft more accurately than any of us. It is simultaneously a terrible master that exposes many human limitations and appeals to many human weaknesses. As we have bid to reduce crew workload across many different tasks and increase situational awareness with tools including GPS navigation on moving maps, synthetic terrain displays, and ground proximity warning systems, we have also opened a Pandora’s Box of human factors to bring us back down to the ground with a bump. Sometimes literally.
Distributed Situation Awareness
Pretty much everyone in aviation is familiar with the concept of situation awareness. But as research interest in SA grew, the concept expanded from the individual level to how SA might apply in the context of larger and more complex systems. What does distributed SA actually mean? The idea is that SA is held by both human and non-human agents. Myriad technological artefacts within a system also hold some form of SA. Now if, like me, you initially struggle with the idea that an artefact (such as a radio, or altimeter) can have ‘awareness’, then bear with me…
ARE YOU A SPECIALIST AVIATOR? WHY DEVELOPING RANGE IS PART OF YOUR JOB.
Photo: Lloyd Horgan Most of us will recognise amongst our colleagues that figure who has an unmatched knowledge of their aircraft and operational procedures but isn’t a natural team player, doesn’t share thought processes much, and just perhaps doesn’t quite integrate with the rest of his/her colleagues as comfortably as others. We admire technical knowledgeContinueContinue reading “ARE YOU A SPECIALIST AVIATOR? WHY DEVELOPING RANGE IS PART OF YOUR JOB.”
Developing Competency in Problem-Solving and Decision Making: The importance of Process vs Outcome.
Separating the quality of a decision from the quality of the processes which lead to a decision being made sounds like it should be straight-forward, but it isn’t. This is especially true if we judge a decision to be a bad one, or a wrong one, when our negative perception of the choice can easily overwhelm what could have been a perfectly acceptable, collaborative, and well-communicated thought process.
The distinction between the quality of the decision-making process and the decision itself is an important one to make in the context of training for competency because although we won’t always make the right, or the best, decisions in any given situation, the ability to develop and improve our decision-making processes, is what competency-based training is all about.
Competency based training. By trying to solve one training problem are we creating another?
At the beginning of this month I tuned in to the Royal Aeronautical Society’s webinar titled, Flight Crew Competence; Assessing what and how? The webinar aimed to address the concept of Evidence Based Training and Competency Based Training (EBT/CBT) and consider the impact it has had on the experience of instructors, examiners and trainees. TheContinueContinue reading “Competency based training. By trying to solve one training problem are we creating another?”
Small Talk, Big distraction: Taking a look at the sterile cockpit concept through the lens of helicopter operations
The concept of the ‘Sterile Cockpit’ as a defence against distraction is a well known one, even well below the cruising levels of the world’s airline operations. The chances are most helicopter pilots will be familiar with it as a company Standard Operating Procedure. Not so many will know that it is in fact aContinueContinue reading “Small Talk, Big distraction: Taking a look at the sterile cockpit concept through the lens of helicopter operations”
The checklist in the rotary wing cockpit: Understanding what, why, and how.
Do helicopter crews have as good an understanding of the proper use of checklists and checklist philosophy as their airline pilot brethren? Like everyone else, I have worked with checklists since I first set foot in the world of aviation. They are omni-present. But my in own experience – as far as I can recollectContinueContinue reading “The checklist in the rotary wing cockpit: Understanding what, why, and how.”
AERONAUTICAL DECISION-MAKING AND LOSS AVERSION:
What Nobel Prize Winner Daniel Kahneman can teach us about why taking the hardest decisions of them all is so hard. In his book Thinking Fast and Slow Nobel Prize winning economist and thinker Daniel Kahneman introduces us to many fascinating insights into the human decision-making process. Loss Aversion is one of these. He beginsContinueContinue reading “AERONAUTICAL DECISION-MAKING AND LOSS AVERSION:”
Crew Resource Management Training from Classroom to Cockpit. Are we missing a link?
When preparing for a trip to the simulator most of us start by reaching for the emergency and abnormal checklist to refresh ourselves on the inevitable bevvy of aircraft malfunctions that we know will be coming our way in due course. Who hasn’t come across that sim instructor who feels it would be a derelictionContinueContinue reading “Crew Resource Management Training from Classroom to Cockpit. Are we missing a link?”
Don’t neglect your CRM: The value of telling stories
Last week was a CRM week. I was immersed in a Crew Resource Management course for aspiring facilitators with three full days dedicated to talking, listening, and learning about flying, human factors, and facilitation. Learning from the experiences of others is a lot of what human factors training is about. You don’t do that withoutContinueContinue reading “Don’t neglect your CRM: The value of telling stories”
Can you learn to deal with the unexpected & unpredictable?
Cognitive Readiness in Search and Rescue operations: What is it? Do you have it? How do you get it? There’s a problem with training to learn to deal with the unexpected: we simply don’t know in advance what the objectives of any training or instruction should be. If you haven’t come across it already, CognitiveContinueContinue reading “Can you learn to deal with the unexpected & unpredictable?”
Can a fatal accident provide proof that CRM training does save lives?
On July the 4th last year an AW139 departing from Big Grand Cay in the Bahamas at night hit the water shortly after take off killing all on board. The US National Transport Safety Board (NTSB) has just released the transcript from the cockpit voice recorder carried on board. Perhaps the most shocking part ofContinueContinue reading “Can a fatal accident provide proof that CRM training does save lives?”
Full Crew Flight Monitoring: mitigating the unique hazards in HEMS operations.
EASA’s Annual Safety Recommendations Review 2019 has identified HEMS as one of its key safety topics noting that, “EASA has received several Safety Recommendations over the last years related to this topic.” before going on to comment that, “There are several unique hazards faced by Helicopter Emergency Medical Services (HEMS) operations. The time pressure, planning challengesContinueContinue reading “Full Crew Flight Monitoring: mitigating the unique hazards in HEMS operations.”
Decision Making in a complex environment: The role of experience, intuition, and the contribution of team behaviours.
What is a complex environment? Put simply, a complex environment is a system or situation that has too many elements and relationships to understand in simple analytical or logical ways. It is a landscape with multiple and diverse connections, and dynamic and interdependent relationships, events, and processes. While there may be trends and patterns, theyContinueContinue reading “Decision Making in a complex environment: The role of experience, intuition, and the contribution of team behaviours.”
Crew Resource Management for Search and Rescue Operations.
It’s a personal opinion, but I think that one of the most enduring fallacies of Search and Rescue, (and one that SAR practitioners worldwide are unlikely to be working hard to shake off!), is that it is somehow an elite branch of the helicopter world that requires a higher level of skill or ability thanContinueContinue reading “Crew Resource Management for Search and Rescue Operations.”
Flattening the gradient
What former US Navy Captain and leadership guru David Marquet can teach us about managing power gradient. The premise of David Marquet’s book Leadership is Language, (For more on Marquet click to his website) is that the deliberate and self aware choice of language in how we communicate within teams can transform the way we communicateContinueContinue reading “Flattening the gradient”
The Chimp, the Virus, and the Helicopter:
Coping with confinement and COVID-19 induced stress. What is the link between a chimp and a helicopter?… apart from the fact that every instructor you ever had told you that any monkey can be taught to fly one! In his best-selling book The Chimp Paradox, Professor Steve Peters (click for further information) describes a sevenContinueContinue reading “The Chimp, the Virus, and the Helicopter:”
Crew Resource Management: Is it time to rethink our approach?
Let’s not beat around the bush, Crew Resource Management has an image problem. For many, CRM training means little more than a day in the classroom which generally inspires at best a resigned ambivalence. CRM has an image problem… Perhaps, there has been a failure to attempt to define CRM for what it really is.ContinueContinue reading “Crew Resource Management: Is it time to rethink our approach?”
“Engine failure! Cut cut!” Power loss during winching operations: the pre-eminent risk in your assessment?
“Clear door, ready to winch.” “Power assessment/hover scenario: Ditching/Committed/Flyaway/Safe Single Engine.” For most of us who fly multi-engine helicopter types, single engine performance and the choice of flight profiles deriving from this was introduced as a predominant consideration from the beginning of our flying training, and has remained there ever since. Our pre-flight calculations, ourContinueContinue reading ““Engine failure! Cut cut!” Power loss during winching operations: the pre-eminent risk in your assessment?”
The Structured Debrief: The Big 7
The Structured DebriefDuring my time in the military a debrief often began with the question, “Any flight safety points?” A closed question. A question that invites a no. It was meant to show the primacy of flight safety in what we were doing. What it actually did was immediately put people on the spot ifContinueContinue reading “The Structured Debrief: The Big 7”
Debrief to learn: El debriefing para aprender
El empleo del ‘debriefing’ como herramienta de entrenamiento para los profesionales aeronáuticos es la manera más eficaz para aprender, hablar de la toma de decisiones, adquirir/revisar habilidades técnicas y mejorar el trabajo en equipo. Effective debriefing as a training tool for aviation professionals is the most effective way to learn, to talk about decision-making, toContinueContinue reading “Debrief to learn: El debriefing para aprender”
What does the language barrier mean to the multi-national cockpit?
The challenges of piloting an aircraft can often load us up enough without overlaying the cognitive effort involved in transmitting and receiving information in a language other than our own. But plenty of pilots out there do just that every day. In aviation, those of us lucky enough to have English as our motherContinueContinue reading “What does the language barrier mean to the multi-national cockpit?”
What delivering two years of CRM training has taught me.
Something over two years ago I decided I would throw my hand in at applying to be a CRM Trainer and Human Factors Facilitator. CRM had never really been my thing. My experience of Human Factors/CRM training up to that point was that ‘facilitators’ tend to be either evangelical to the extent that their fervourContinueContinue reading “What delivering two years of CRM training has taught me.”
A machine for jumping to conclusions:
Human Decision-making: Extracts from Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow. Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel prize winner for his work, first became famous for his article Judgement under uncertainty (1974) Heuristics and Biases. The Article was produced from research funded by US Department of Defense and Office of Naval Research. He expanded this into a bookContinueContinue reading “A machine for jumping to conclusions:”
Aviation safety culture and the paradox of success: Can safety innovation keep pace with technological progress?
The aviation industry is hailed as a pioneer of safety practices, of open reporting, of just culture, and in learning from its mistakes. And given its remarkable safety record, this reputation is perhaps justified. Nevertheless, it would be both complacent and counter to those values themselves to believe that the goal of safety has alreadyContinueContinue reading “Aviation safety culture and the paradox of success: Can safety innovation keep pace with technological progress?”
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