The document discusses how human factors analysis can improve aviation safety at both the individual and organizational levels. It argues that human errors are a major cause of aviation accidents, so understanding human behavior and limitations through human factors analysis can help prevent mistakes. At the individual level, this includes analyzing workload, fatigue, resilience and latent risk factors. At the organizational level, it involves analyzing safety rules and communication approaches to make them more suitable for humans. The overall goal of human factors analysis in aviation safety management systems is to reduce human errors and improve safety.

1. Assignment 2
There are 61 out of 104 fatal aviation accidents in 2000s were caused by human errors.
(PlaneCrashInfo, 2014) Thus, human play a significant role in aviation’s safety, and
complete human factors application could help the aviation safety improve much. On
the other hand, every management system needs human’s operation to make it function.
Therefore, human could affect the management system’s function and health much.
Furthermore, there are still many aviation tasks cannot be completed wholly by
machines, such as air-controller and maintenance work. In addition, even the tasks
which could be completed by highly automatic technology, still need human’s
regulation and maintenance. Therefore, human is still an indispensable part in all safety
management system (SMS) and aviation organization. Additional, with such high-tech
equipment and mature aviation documents at present, the machines, systems, processes
and rules are quite reliable and the error’s frequency has already been reduced to quite
low level. However, comparing with machines, human are much more likely to make
mistakes because human will do more complex tasks, and there are much more factors
that could affect human’s actions and decisions. Thus, human’s errors become a great
challenge for today’s aviation safety, and complete human factors (HF) analysis could
promote both individuals’ and organizations’ safety by preventing human’s mistakes
and improving safety condition. This essay will point out the importance of the HF
application in SMS and detail the reasons why HF analysis could improve both
individuals’ and organization’s safety.

2. At individual side, the HF analysis could improve the aviation safety by improving the
mistakes prevention. The modern aviation documents already have complete rules and
processes that could avoid most of the mistakes and unsafe actions but still have defects.
In addition, the safety documents just consider on the general situations which make
the documents may not suit for every individual and every condition. For example, the
air-control towers cannot be built in a same style and the inside-design also cannot be
set completely same because different place has different building rules and different
airport has different air-control equipment. Furthermore, human are more likely to be
affected by the conditions than machines because human’s brain and mind are much
complex than machine’s systems. Thus, unintentional mistakes may occur even people
follow the rules. On the other hand, people may also intentionally break the safety rules
by some reasons sometimes because human are autonomous animals with complex
brains. For example, on 1987 August 16th
, Northwestern airline flight 255 was crashed
just after it took-off because the pilots forgot to set the flaps at correct position which
made the aircraft cannot get enough lift force for take-off. This mistake could be
prevented base on the safety rules at that time if the pilots had not broken the safety
rules. With the safety rules at that time, the pilots need to complete a pre-flight checklist
which contain hundred steps before take-off and the pilots need to restart from the first
step if the checking is broke in the middle in case miss any step. However, because the
checklist is such long, the pilots of Northwestern Airline flight 255 did not restart the
checking from the very beginning and forgot to check the flaps. On the other hand, even
the pilots forgot to check the flaps, the aircraft should have take-off warning, which is

3. controlled by P40 circuit breaker, to remind the pilots that the flaps have not set
correctly. However, the pilots of flight 255 download the P40 circuit breaker which
made them cannot get the warning. The reason for this accident seems all point to pilots’
rule breakings, but these two rule breakings happened quite often among the pilots at
that time. Thus, the problem cannot be solved if just emphasize the rules or add new
rules because pilots may still break the rules. Therefore, to radically solve the problems,
SMS need to focus on the reasons for pilots break the rules such often based on human
factors analysis. With human factors analysis, the real reasons could be found out. The
reason for pilots do not restart the checklist is that the whole checklist is too long and
it would cost such a long time to restart if the last check job was broken in the middle
or even nearly finish. At the same time, because the take-off warning will ring at any
time when pilots push up the throttle level even the aircraft was not going to take off
and the warning makes people anxious, pilots download the P40 circuit breaker. Thus,
it is easy to find out that break the checklist into some parts and stop take-off warning
if the aircrafts are not taking off could solve the problem radically. (Air Crash
Investigation, 2003-present) Therefore, mistake analysis based on human factors could
prevent the human mistakes radically and improve the individual safety much.
At the same time, differently from machines, human are more easily to get fatigued
after a long time work or high pressure work. Fatigued people are more likely to make
mistakes and unsafe actions. In addition, fatigued people’s strength and reaction will
also reduce which weaken their prevention for suddenly dangerous events. On the

4. contrary, too less workload will also increase the frequency of mistakes because people
will not pay enough attention to the work that is too easy. However, the workload cannot
be balanced by one simple standard because different task has different character and
different stress. (Phyllis, 2002) For example, the workload for flying 8 hours aircraft
and doing 8 hours airport check-in work are quite different. Also, the workload for
flying with sunny weather and flying with rain storm and low cloud are quite different.
Therefore, it is quite important for the SMS to do the human factors analysis to standard
suitable workload for each job to reduce the fatigue and frequency of making mistakes.
Furthermore, the human factors application also analysis the resilience management
which could also help to improve the individual’s safety. For the novice, professional
documents and processes easily cause misunderstandings and lead to mistakes in the
end. At this time, the human factors analysis could find out the radical reason for these
mistakes is misunderstanding caused by shortage of knowledge and experience.
(Hollnagel, et al., 2006) Therefore, with human factors analysis, the organizations could
find out how much resilience each level of staff are needed to reduce the mistakes
caused by misunderstandings. In addition, as claimed before, human are easily to be
affected by the conditions. Thus, uncomfortable condition could affect people’s
judgment and mood which lead to people make incorrect decisions or mistakes. For
example, not clear runway sight for air-controller may make the air-controller confused
when working with high workload. Also, too much noise will make people anxious and
easy to make incorrect decisions. Thus, human factors analysis could identify latent
condition factors that may affect people to make correct judgment. Furthermore, human

5. factors analysis could also identify latent condition risks. Because human are not
fastened as equipment does, there will have some latent condition risks for human when
they are moving. This latent condition risks cannot be found out at normal safety
analysis because it will not consider human’s action. For example, setting steep stairs
in working area do not show any safety hazard with normal safety analysis. The stairs
are hard enough and have positive reliability in next few years. However, with the
human-based analysis, this steep stairs is quite dangerous. People may fall and get
injured when walking down quickly. Thus, it could be seen that human factors analysis
could find out latent condition risks base on human. These risks are more dangerous
because it may hurt the human. Human injured are much worse than equipment damage
because it cost much more money on training an engineer than buying equipment. Thus,
human factors analysis which could find out this human-based condition risks could
improve employees’ safety when working. Therefore, human factors application could
create a suitable work condition which could reduce the mistakes making and improve
the individual safety.
At organization side, human factors application makes the communication in SMS
smoothly that could improve the whole organizations’safety. (Phyllis, 2002) The safety
documents and safety rules which made by SMS are used to prevent people making
mistakes. Thus, suitable and human-based rules and documents could give people a
comfortable environment which make them work smoothly and make fewer mistakes.
Also more suitable the rules are, more efficient they would be on preventing mistakes.

6. People will not follow the rules if they believe the rules are too difficult to follow or
they believe the rules will not function on protecting their safety. However, because the
rules follower and rules maker are different people, it is quite hard for the rule makers
to realize whether the rules are suitable for the employees. At this time, human factors
analysis with communication between rules follower and rules maker could help the
SMS make prefect rules. The SMS could analysis the rules function based on the human
level with the feedbacks from the employees and change the rules to make them suit
for human. At the same time, analysis human’s communication approach could also
improve the organization safety. Differently with machines’ speaker, human have
different stress when talking which could help people to judge how emergency the
events are. Thus, human communication analysis could help the organizations find out
the suitable communication approach to make the communication describe the meaning
more correctly and efficiently. Also, this analysis could help to improve the mechanical
language system to help people get correct judgment about how emergency the events
are. Furthermore, because different culture has different speaking habit, communication
analysis could help to reduce the misunderstanding caused by language culture.
Therefore, human factors application could help the whole organization improve the
safety level by human-based safety communication and communication analysis.
At the same time, human factors application could also help the SMS to create a safety
culture for the whole organizations. Making safety become a culture could improve
safety much. Every person in the organizations think about safety actively at any time

7. is much better than any perfect safety rule or document. Human is the basis of culture
and the culture cannot be created without human. Thus, the safety culture needs to be
built and could easily to be affected by the people in the organizations. Therefore, the
human factors analysis in SMS which contain human-based safety analysis could push
the organization to create a safety culture. With human factors analysis, it is easy to find
out how to encourage people to think safety actively and educate people to learn about
safety protections. At the same time, with human factors analysis, it is also easy to find
about whether employees have enough safety knowledge and skills to support their
work. If people do not have enough knowledge on safety, the safety rules and processes
cannot affect as they are expected. The employees do not have enough knowledge to
understand the radical purpose of the safety rules and processes, and may even
misunderstand the safety rules. People are more easily forget to follow the safety rules
if they do not know why they need to do that. Thus, analysis employees’ knowledge
level and educate them to reach the standards could promote the organizations to create
a safety culture. (Lauver, 2007) Therefore, human factors application could help the
organizations create a safety culture which could improve the organizations’ safety
actively and greatly.
In conclusion, human factors application in SMS could help the organizations to realize
the whole organizations’ safety more clearly at human level. The organizations could
prevent mistakes more efficiently by finding out radical reasons why people make
mistakes, not just reasons why the mistakes happen. The employees could work more

8. comfortable and make fewer mistakes with suitable rules, workload, resilience
management and safety conditions which are made by human factors applications. In
addition, human factors analysis could find out how to push the employees to create a
safety culture. Therefore, human factors applications in SMS could improve the safety
of both individuals and organizations.
References
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