Pilot error

Various forms of threat and error management have been implemented into pilot training programs to teach crew members how to deal with impending situations that arise throughout the course of a flight.

Furthermore, any attempt to incriminate the pilots does not consider that they are part of a broader system, which in turn may be accountable for their fatigue, work pressure, or lack of training.

"Causes of error include fatigue, workload, and fear as well as cognitive overload, poor interpersonal communications, imperfect information processing, and flawed decision making.

"[10] Throughout the course of every flight, crews are intrinsically subjected to a variety of external threats and commit a range of errors that have the potential to negatively impact the safety of the aircraft.

Environmental threats are ultimately out of the hands of crew members and the airline, as they hold no influence on "adverse weather conditions, air traffic control shortcomings, bird strikes, and high terrain.

[15] For example, on 28 December 2014, AirAsia Flight 8501, which was carrying seven crew members and 155 passengers, crashed into the Java Sea due to several fatal mistakes made by the captain in the poor weather conditions.

In this case, the captain chose to exceed the maximum climb rate for a commercial aircraft, which caused a critical stall from which he was unable to recover.

[16] TEM involves the effective detection and response to internal or external factors that have the potential to degrade the safety of an aircraft's operations.

[19] With the consolidation of onboard computer systems and the implementation of proper pilot training, airlines and crew members look to mitigate the inherent risks associated with human factors.

This includes the following processes: The need for CTM training is a result of the capacity of human attentional facilities and the limitations of working memory.

An example of this is a digital attitude indicator, which simultaneously shows the pilot the heading, airspeed, descent or ascent rate and a plethora of other pertinent information.

Implementations such as these allow crews to gather multiple sources of information quickly and accurately, which frees up mental capacity to be focused on other, more prominent tasks.

The use of checklists before, during and after flights has established a strong presence in all types of aviation as a means of managing error and reducing the possibility of risk.

An example is the IM SAFE checklist (illness, medication, stress, alcohol, fatigue/food, emotion) and a number of other qualitative assessments which pilots may perform before or during a flight to ensure the safety of the aircraft and passengers.

One of the most famous examples of an aircraft disaster that was attributed to pilot error was the night-time crash of Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 near Miami, Florida on 29 December 1972.

Told by ATC to hold over a sparsely populated area away from the airport while they dealt with the problem (with, as a result, very few lights visible on the ground to act as an external reference), the distracted flight crew did not notice the plane losing height and the aircraft eventually struck the ground in the Everglades, killing 101 of the 176 passengers and crew.

The subsequent National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) report on the incident blamed the flight crew for failing to monitor the aircraft's instruments properly.

1994 Fairchild Air Force Base B-52 crash , caused by flying the aircraft beyond its operational limits. Here the aircraft is seen in an unrecoverable bank, a split second before the crash. This accident is now used in military and civilian aviation environments as a case study in teaching crew resource management.
Actual flight path (red) of TWA Flight 3 from departure to crash point ( controlled flight into terrain ). Blue line shows the nominal Las Vegas course, while green is a typical course from Boulder. The pilot inadvertently used the Boulder outbound course instead of the appropriate Las Vegas course.
Map of the 2001 Linate Airport runway collision caused by taking the wrong taxiing route (red instead of green), as control tower had not given clear instructions. The accident occurred in thick fog.
The Tenerife airport disaster now serves as a textbook example. [ 1 ] Due to several misunderstandings, the KLM flight tried to take off while the Pan Am flight was still on the runway. The airport was accommodating an unusually large number of commercial airliners, resulting in disruption of the normal use of taxiways.
The "three-pointer" design altimeter is one of the most prone to being misread by pilots (a cause of the UA 389 and G-AOVD crashes).
Multiple sources of information can be taken from one interface here, known as the PFD, or primary flight display from which pilots receive all of the most important data readings
A military pilot reads the pre-flight checklist prior the mission. Checklists ensure that pilots are able to follow operational procedure and aid in memory recall.