Flight Crew Management

Paper Summary:

Flight crew resource management is the science of training flight crews to interact and communicate in a highly authoritarian environment while, at the same time, making use of the intelligence and professional resources of all the members of a flight crew. In the cockpit, the captain is in unquestionable control of the airplane because he is ultimately responsible for all aspects of the flight, including hardware, equipment, and personnel on board. However, each member of the crew can make important contributions, especially during in-flight crises, but their input can be thwarted because of the highly authoritarian command culture. This paper examines the issues of flight crew resource management and seeks to expand the definition of crew resource management to include personal communication style in order to further facilitate professional, accurate, and open communication between the flight staff and commander.

From the Paper:

"According to Wilson (2001) aviation accidents and mishaps are attributed to human error in 60% to 80% of cases. A large number of these mishaps can be directly traced to the failures in coordination among cockpit crews during the time of the crises. The situations are not caused by poor pilot or crew skills. Just the opposite is true. When highly professional staff and crew encounter a crisis situation, often their training can hinder the communication and double checking of decision making that could often avoid the indecent, or accident. In the majority of controlled flight accidents and incidents poor pilot performance through improper and faulty crew resource management (CRM) have been cited as contributing factors in numerous accidents and incidents reported by major airlines during the period covering 1983 to 1985 (U.S. General Accounting Office, 1997). The U.S. General Accounting Office (1997) found that CRM deficiencies, such as the lack of coordination among cockpit crews, captain's decisions to keep tasks to himself rather than assign tasks or check decisions with other members, and / or a lack of effective crew supervision were a contributing cause in approximately half of accidents that occurred between 1983 and 1985 that involved one or more fatalities. Other reviews have found similar factors at work within cited accident reports (Chidester, Helmreich, Gregorich, & Geis, 1991; Gregorich, Helmreich, & Wilhelm, 1990)."

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