Human Factors Analysis and Classification System

The Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS) identifies the human causes of an accident and offers tools for analysis as a way to plan preventive training.

[1] It was developed by Dr. Scott Shappell of the Civil Aviation Medical Institute and Dr. Doug Wiegmann of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign in response to a trend that showed some form of human error was a primary causal factor in 80% of all flight accidents in the Navy and Marine Corps.

[1] HFACS is based in the "Swiss cheese model" of human error[2] which looks at four levels of human failure, including unsafe acts, preconditions for unsafe acts, unsafe supervision, and organizational influences.

[1] It is a comprehensive human error framework that folded James Reason's ideas into the applied setting, defining 19 causal categories within four levels of human failure.

[3]