New wine in old bottles

Over 90 million flights have been conducted since the last major accident in the US, 15 years ago. 

Since then, safety science thought has progressed well beyond error analysis and towards identifying leading signals in big data.

Unfortunately, old paradigms of human error fixation and severity bias persist.  The industry has yet to meaningfully adopt 'new view' principles of safety science that have emerged in recent decades.  

Monetization of

safety information

An ethical chasm is widening between altruistic entities who believe "there's no competition in safety," and commercial interests seeking to balkanize and monetize safety data. 

Flight data monitoring (FDM) and line oriented safety audits (LOSA) are examples of private companies seeking to financially benefit from data hoarding.

Incidents are the

new accidents

Aviation incidents are sensational.  In the absence of accidents, incidents have replaced accidents as the new normal. However, regulations and safety management practices have lagged. 

Examples include open source data ubiquity, the personalization of flight data for pilots, and the role of the NTSB. 

Without articulate leadership, the public (who ultimately fund the FAA through Congress) will have a misperception of safety risk in commercial aviation.

Corruption of 

'human factors'

EASA's recently released AI Roadmap 2.0 makes extensive use of a 'human-centric' and 'trustworthy' approach towards AI implementation, touting the need for human factors.

However, the directionality of this inititative is for reduced crew operation (RCO), single pilot operations (SPO), and the 'ulitimate step towards autonomy' (EASA, 2024).

Human factors is therefore being radically redefined.  No longer is it a genre of CRM, TEM, shared mental models, communication and the like, but rather strictly a human-machine interface (HMI) problem to be overcome.

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