Human performance on the flight deck

While reading the book on Human Performance on the Flight Deck, I kept thinking about an old wisdom that ends with the words ‘Comments and criticism tell more about the speaker than about the target’. I found the text so interesting that I read the whole book without taking notes. Not very wise if one intends to write a review! No worries, I read it a second time and took many notes. In the first run, I felt like I was travelling back to my early days in school when my teacher told me that I was suitable for flying a jet fighter if well trained but the likelihood of surviving that training was not extremely high. So my mother banned that idea from our life. Only months later, the newspapers reported something which sounded like a miracle. Some scientists in the USA had allegedly found out why jet fighters in Southern Europe would crash much more often than in the USA. And the solution described was unbelievably simple, with the culprit being the missing fit between the anthropometric dimensions of the pilots and the design of the flight helmets and suits. Of course, nobody would believe the news until one day the official statistics confirmed the declining number of crashes of fighter planes. Without a systematic approach, the research work was very unlikely to precisely detect a simple cause in an environment considered ‘high tech’. Technical people tend to find a technical solution. Around two decades later, human factors people analysing the reactor incidence of Three Mile Island came up with comparably simple causes for an accident that would not only destroy an industrial plant but cripple the development of nuclear technology in the USA for more than three decades. Their methodology, however, was highly sophisticated. Reading the book, every third page reminded me of those analyses I once had to study for safety evaluations of nuclear power plants in my country. There are many other reasons for me to find the book highly interesting. First to highlight is the main approach, an integrated, systems approach that seems to have been lost and forgotten in recent years. In the public notion in many countries, ergonomics or human factors are reduced to office chairs or mice that help avoid RSI (Repetitive Strain Injuries) problems and the like. Human Factors as a discipline has come of age, not only in aviation as stated by Harris. Some would even claim that the discipline has come out of fashion. Protagonists of disciplines like UX (user experience) prefer to meet on a different plane, if not on a different planet. But from some manuscripts offered to this journal, it is easy to recognise that focusing on new and highly interesting aspects may also mean losing track of crucial things. The aviation business is an excellent example for the holistic theory, the departure point of which is the notion that the parts of any whole cannot exist and cannot be understood except in their relation to the whole. And ‘Human Performance on the Flight Deck’ is a passionate plea for saving a prominent role for HFs in aviation, not just on the flight deck. In difference to his earlier book ‘Human Factors for Civil Flight Deck Design’, the subject matter is not limited to the design of the ‘flight deck’. And this time, Harris is the author and not the editor. Harris’s ‘skimpy’ history of human factors in aviation covers almost all history of ergonomics (human factors) because one of the founders of the discipline, Al Chapanis, had started earning his stripes in aviation in the early 1940s. When he published his ‘The Chapanis Chronicles’ in 1999, 50 odd years later, the Flying Fortress B17 on the cover was not the only indication that human factors in aviation are still an issue which has yet to be fully resolved, if ever. Harris’s book is a strong plea for further developing HF as a decisive part of aviation technology instead of considering it a ‘hygiene factor’ from Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Or icing on the cake, as many people think of HF. The book is organised following the five ‘M’s’model, where it is easy to recognise the meaning and importance of the last four, Machine – Mission – Management – Medium. But the first ‘M’, the ‘huMan’, reveals the origin of the model from the era of MMI (man-machine-interaction) when females were allowed to perform tasks considered male jobs only in cases of emergency, e.g. during major wars. The amendment ‘hu’ is a tribute to the new role of women in human factors terminology. Behaviour & Information Technology Vol. 31, No. 5, May 2012, 541–543