Crew Resource Management
Crew (or Cockpit) Resource Management (CRM) training originated from a NASA workshop in 1979 that focused on improving air safety. The NASA research presented at this meeting found that the primary cause of the majority of aviation accidents was human error, and that the main problems were failures of interpersonal communication, leadership, and decision making in the cockpit. A textbook example of such an event was the catastrophic accident of two years earlier, the infamous Tenerife disaster.
CRM training for crew has since been introduced and developed by aviation organisations including major airlines and military aviation worldwide. CRM training is now a mandated requirement for commercial pilots working under most regulatory bodies worldwide, including the FAA (U.S.) and JAA (Europe).
CRM training encompasses a wide range of knowledge, skills and attitudes includingcommunications, situational awareness, problem solving, decision making, andteamwork; together with all the attendant sub-disciplines which each of these areasentails. CRM can be defined as a management system which makes optimum use of all available resources - equipment, procedures and people - to promote safety and enhance the efficiency offlight operations.
CRM is concerned not so much with the technical knowledge and skills required tofly and operate an aircraft but rather with the cognitive and interpersonal skills neededto manage the flight within an organised aviation system. In this context, cognitiveskills are defined as the mental processes used for gaining and maintaining situationalawareness, for solving problems and for taking decisions. Interpersonal skills areregarded as communications and a range of behavioural activities associated withteamwork. In aviation, as in other walks of life, these skill areas often overlap witheach other, and they also overlap with the required technical skills. Furthermore, theyare not confined to multi-crew aircraft, but also relate to single pilot operations, whichinvariably need to interface with other aircraft and with various ground supportagencies in order to complete their missions successfully.
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United Airlines Flight 232
Captain Al Haynes, pilot of United Airlines Flight 232, credits Crew Resource Management as being one of the factors that saved his own life, and many others, in the Sioux City Iowa Crash of July 1989.Source (Haynes' Eyewitness account): [1]
See also
External links
- Evolution of CRM in pdf
- University of Texas Human Factors Research Project
- Crew Resource Management Current Regulatory Paper pdf
Categories
Aviation