Human factors in air accident investigation: a training needs analysis

Human Factors (HF) has long been identified as one of the main causes of incidents and accidents in the transportation industry, and more recently has become increasingly important in air accident investigation and safety improvement. As a result, many National Investigation Agencies (NIAs) are now explicitly acknowledging HF in their final investigation reports. Whereas engineering-and operations-led investigation can highlight what happened and how it occurred, it is increasingly recognised that the integration of HF into an investigation can help understand why a sequence of events led to an incident or accident. However, there are considerable challenges to more thorough integration of HF into air accident investigations. Most notably, there remains a reluctance amongst some NIAs to fully embrace HF and address potentially important HF issues in detail in their investigations. Consequently, there is a risk that some investigations are consistently overlooking potentially critical HF issues, and as a result fail to fully address why an incident or accident occurred. There is a need for research that examines these challenges, including the possible gap that exists between research and industry regarding the development and applicability of accident analysis tools, and that provides practical solutions to enable a better integration of HF in air accident investigations ... [cont.].