Category Archives: Human Factors

H2F BITESIZE #28

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.

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.

H2F BITESIZE #12

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: Differences in physical workload between military helicopter pilots and cabin (technical) crew.

H2F BITESIZE #11

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: Investigating Offshore Helicopter Pilots’ Cognitive Load and Physiological Responses during Simulated In-Flight Emergencies

H2F BITESIZE #10

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: Factors affecting safety during night visual approach segments for offshore helicopters.

H2F BITESIZE #9

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: Is It All about the Mission? Comparing Non-technical Skills across Offshore Transport and Search and Rescue Helicopter 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.

How do you know when cognitive workload is affecting your performance?

Cognitive workload is an important variable with which to understand pilot performance, particularly when under pressure, but measuring it is notoriously difficult. A recent study by Brazilian test pilots and academics investigated new methods of measuring it during helicopter emergencies. In a world in which we are adding advanced cockpit systems at an ever increasing pace a better understanding of how and when pilots are impacted by cognitive capacity will allow us to design better for management and mitigation of workload breakdowns in critical flight scenarios.

A Bad Week

It’s been a been a tough week for helicopter aviation. In Western Europe, three accidents in six days. Six lives lost. More seriously injured. In the rest of the world, another five accidents and over twenty lives. In six days. So many accidents in such a short period of time delivers a strong reminder to us about the kind of tasks that we as a society ask of our helicopters and their crews: They are often difficult, and sometimes dangerous, even for the very best of them.

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.

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.

Helicopter human factors in focus

“For no other vehicle is the need for human factors research more critical, or more difficult.” Sandra G. Hart.

That’s a bold assertion that I had never heard anyone make before and consequently had never given much consideration to whether or not it might be the case. So let’s unpack that proposition a little by looking at the arguments that the author offers to back it up…

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.”

On Lookout and helicopters

The importance of an effective lookout. We’ve heard it from day one in aviation, a constant through our flying training days and beyond. The dangers of mid-air collision, obstacles, and controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) will always be there.  These are not static threats however, but are always evolving. Take the proliferation of drones asContinueContinue reading “On Lookout and helicopters”

Is Human Factors in aviation at a crossroads?

Now seems like a good time to look beyond the dark prism of the current COVID-induced crisis in aviation to consider a future beyond the mire. The Chartered Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors (CIEHF) recently published a White Paper called “The Human Dimension in Tomorrow’s Aviation System”. It’s made up of a series ofContinueContinue reading “Is Human Factors in aviation at a crossroads?”

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?”

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:”

Human perception & the mental model

Memory and meaning I cdnuol’t blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aocdcrnig to rscheearch at Cmadrigbe Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht odrer the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt thnig is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghitContinueContinue reading “Human perception & the mental model”