Crew Resource Management Development: Characteristics, Perspectives, and Experiences

Background

We, as humans, have been aspired by the birds staying aloft since times unknown. Drew about it, wrote about it but never really understood the true essence of the phrase ‘birds of a feather flock together’. Research is needed to tie cultural models to aviation human factors and CRM so that the variability among cultures can lead to synergy in the cockpit (Redding, 1984). Aviation has come of age in all technological aspects of it but the human element has not evolved to stay parallel to what the redundancies have been applied on the machine side. Further uses involving safety-critical systems have utilized redundancy as a method of achieving high-availability and/or fault-tolerant operation. (Hecht, 2004) (Isermann, 2006). Hence, there is an inevitable requirement observed in finding increased methods to ensure that there is improvement in this all-important domain of human factors, Crew Resource Management.

CRM was so elaborate a system created out of necessity by aviation that no matter which High-Reliability Organization (HRO) was and is present, took it up as the most effective method to reduce human fallibility. Starting from the Civil Nuclear Technology sector to medical science, all have adhered to the principles of CRM. It was elaborated as the utility of diverse ‘resources’ available to the aviation industry which should be brought into play in order to enable learning & developing the art and the skill required for safe & efficient operations in all airborne facets while ensuring landings equal the all takeoffs of whole flight deck managers while using excellent ergonomics. This was the outcome of research of NTSB’s well-cited mind doctor John K. Lauber in 1984.