Exploring Human Error in Military Aviation Flight Safety Events Using Post-Incident Classification Systems

Abstract

Skill-based errors in military operations are more prevalent in rotary wing incidents and are related to higher level supervisory processes in the organization. The Cognitive Error Taxonomy provides increased granularity to HFACS analyses of unsafe acts.

Human Factors in Financial Trading

“…Such taxonomies should be tailored to the industry and should utilize human factors concepts to codify data on the types of incident experienced by operators (e.g., their technical nature, their outcomes), the workplace problems that lead to them (e.g., human–computer interfaces), and the skills and behaviors important for a work domain (e.g., in team vs. noncollaborative roles). The data collected can be used to collect headline data on incident occurrences within a given industry—for example, that in surgery, 43% of incidents involve team communication problems ( Gawande, Zinner, Studdert, & Brennan, 2003 ) or that in military aviation, errors are more likely in rotary than in fixed-wing aircraft ( Hooper & O’Hare, 2013 ). Furthermore, incident reporting is used to identify in-depth data on the causes of specific forms of mishap that can be used to develop interventions (e.g., new software, training), or for example, aspects of system design that lead to errors in the flight cockpit ( Billings, 1999 ; Moura, Beer, Patelli, Lewis, & Knoll, 2016 ) or aspects of clinician behavior that either contributed to an adverse event (e.g., loss of situation awareness) or helped to avert it (e.g., teamwork skills; Schulz, Endlsey, Kochs, Gelb, & Wagner, 2013 ; Undre, Sevdalis, Healey, Darzi, & Vincent, 2007 ).…”

The use of error analysis to assess resident performance

“…13 Omission errors were defined as failure to perform a step entirely. Commission errors represented failure to perform a step correctly.…”

“…The field of human factors engineering (HFE) has a long history in developing error-based assessments to improve human performance in high-risk and complex industries including aviation 13 and nuclear energy. 14 HFE is the scientific discipline concerned with understanding interactions among humans and other elements of a system in order to optimize human well-being and overall system performance.…”

“…15 Work in this field led to the development of classification frameworks designed to analyze the causes of errors and define generic classifications for human error mechanisms. 12–13,16 The Cognitive Error Taxonomy is a framework that allows for in depth analyses identifying which decision-making steps were made in error or simply bypassed out of habit. 13,16 Using these error based frameworks in a high-risk and complex environment, such as the operating room, allows us to identify how failures are related to cognitive processes.…”

A systematic approach to public health – Novel application of the human factors analysis and classification system to public health and COVID-19

“…HFACS has also been extended to the proactive management and prediction of incidents through causal pathway analysis in the mining ( Lenné et al, 2012 ), process ( Baldissone et al, 2019 ), aviation ( Hooper and O’Hare, 2013 , Inglis et al, 2010 , Li et al, 2008 , Liu et al, 2013 ), oil and gas ( Theophilus et al, 2017 ), and construction ( Sun et al, 2011 , Ye et al, 2018 ) industries. Neural networks have also been used to predict the unsafe acts (Level 1 errors) from preconditions of unsafe acts (Level 2 errors) (Harris and Li, 2019) and even classify HFACS nanocodes from text data ( Madeira et al, 2021 ).…”