INTEGRATED APPROACH TO HUMAN FACTORS AND SAFETY

INTEGRATED APPROACH TO HUMAN FACTORS AND SAFETY

 Integrated Approach

(a)      Human factors initiatives will be more effective if they are integrated within existing

company processes, and not treated as something additional or separate or short-term. Human factors initiatives have sometimes failed in the past because they have been marginalized and regarded as a temporary ‘fashion’. Much of human factors, in the context of maintenance organizations and JAR145 requirements, are common sense, professionalism, quality management, safety management – i.e. what organizations should already have been doing all along.

(b)     The “human factors” initiatives in the context of JAR145 are really “safety and airworthiness” initiatives, the aim being to ensure that maintenance is conducted in a way that ensures that aircraft are released to service in a safe condition. The organization should have a safety management system in place, many of the elements of which will need to take into account human factors in order to be effective.

(c)      Ideally, human factors best practice should be seamlessly and invisibly integrated within existing company processes, such as training, quality management, occurrence reporting and investigation, etc. Sometimes it is a good idea to re-invent an initiative under a new name if it has failed in the past, but we should be cautious about unnecessarily duplicating functions which may already exist (e.g. occurrence reporting schemes / quality discrepancy reporting/ etc.). It may only be necessary to slightly modify existing processes to meet the JAR 145 human factors requirements.

(d)      Human factors training is probably an exception to the advice given above, in that it is usually so new and different to any existing training that it warrants being treated as a separate entity, at least for initial training. Recurrent training, however, is probably better integrated within existing recurrent training.