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 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 adopt 'new view' principles of safety science that learn from successes, in addition to failures.  

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.

 

Monetizing safety information is unethical and counter to the principles that have brought us to the current state of aviation safety.

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 However, regulations and safety management practices still rely on outdated thinking.

 

Examples include open source data ubiquity, the personalization of flight data for pilots, and the purpose of accident investigation. 

 

Without articulate leadership, the public will have a misperception of safety risk, resulting in misallocation of finite resources.

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 goal 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 turned on its head.  No longer is it a genre of CRM, TEM, shared mental models and the like, but rather a human-machine interface (HMI) problem to be overcome on the way to autonomous flight.