# Human Factors Analysis of Air Traffic Safety Based on HFACS-BN Model
## 1 Introduction  
Safety is an important prerequisite for the sustainable and healthy development of the aviation industry [1]. As a critical area of aviation safety, air traffic control (ATC) requires highly skilled operators to work together in a large and complex human-machine system [2]. In an ATC system, air traffic controllers play a central role, and they have to cooperate with the various components of the ATC system to ensure the safety, order, and efficiency of air traffic flow [3]. Like other complex sociotechnical systems, there are always some risks of interference in the system [4]. Uncooperative interactions between controllers and system components hold potential for human errors, leading to safety breakdowns [5]. In fact, during the second half of the 20 th century, the technical environment changed and the focus of attention in aviation industrial sectors shifted from technological problems to human factors problems and, finally, to problems with organizations and safety culture [6]. Human error is one of the contributors to more than 70% of aviation accidents [7]. This is demonstrated by a review of the Australian ATC system, which finds that coordination and communication errors contribute most to air traffic incidents [5]. In the UK Airprox incident report, human errors in ATC are related to perception, decision making, communication, and team resource management [8]. ATC-related incident examples include on 1 July 2002, a Tu-154m passenger aircraft (BTC2937) ofRussian Bashkir Air collided with a former DHL Express Boeing 757-200 sf cargo plane (DHX611) over the Swiss city of Uberlingen, killing all 71 passengers and crew of both aircraft. The main cause of the accident was a Swiss air traffic control center command serious error; on 11 October 2016, a China Eastern Airlines A320 evaded a runway incursion by narrowly passing over the top of an A330 that had crossed into the active runway due to improper situational awareness by both the pilots and tower controllers. As the number of flights increases, air traffic controllers have to learn from these disasters, and an analysis of human factors may be one of the effective ways to learn from such \"mistakes\" to reduce the number of similar disasters [8]. The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has been working to improve aviation safety and to apply the latest research on human factors to the global aviation industry. Investigators tend to analyze safety issues from a systematic perspective, including human and organizational factors as well as other factors [9]. In this context, the human factor analysis and classification system (HFACS) emerged. HFACS was originally designed and developed based on the \"Swiss-Cheese\" model of Reason and the human error framework, which was used to investigate and analyze human error accidents in American military aviation operations [10], and the framework's developers have demonstrated its applicability to commercial and general aviation accident analysis [11]. Moreover, human factors are important for understanding human performance in a variety of transportation sectors, and HFACS was further adapted to investigate ship and railway accidents arising from human errors [12; 13; 14]. [PERSON] and [PERSON] used HFACS to investigate the human factors in the ship accident [15]. [PERSON] et al. used the HFACS framework to investigate aviation accidents in Nigeria between 1985 and 2010 [16]. [PERSON] et al. used the HFACS framework and Bayesian network to analyze the human factors of crew members behind the aviation accident and evaluate their performance [9]. [PERSON] et al. searched for human factors affecting aviation safety based on the framework of HFACS through the questionnaire survey of airport staff in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. The study focused on the professional opinions of experienced investigators or operators [6]. Through the above review, we found that the existing research can be further improved in the following aspects.