Human Factors in Aircraft Maintenance

Abstract : Human error is cited as a major causal factor in most aviation mishaps, including the 15% - 20% that involve maintenance error. Errors can be described as active failures that lead directly to the incident, and latent failures whose presence provokes the active failure. Typical aviation maintenance errors are presented as examples and two approaches to human error reduction given: incident based and task analysis based. Each approach provides data on performance shaping factors, i.e. situation variables that affect the probability of error occurrences. Examples are given of interventions derived from analysis of incidents and from task analysis.