Citation

Mumaw RJ. Proc. Hum. Factors Ergon. Soc. Annu. Meet. 2017; 61(1): 110-114.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, Publisher SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/1541931213601493

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The role of an alerting system is to make the system operator (e.g., pilot) aware of an impending hazard or unsafe state so the hazard can be avoided or managed successfully. A review of 46 commercial aviation accidents (between 1998 and 2014) revealed that, in the vast majority of events, either the hazard was not alerted or relevant hazard alerting occurred but failed to aid the flight crew sufficiently. For this set of events, alerting system failures were placed in one of five phases: Detection, Understanding, Action Selection, Prioritization, and Execution. This study also reviewed the evolution of alerting system schemes in commercial aviation, which revealed naïve assumptions about pilot reliability in monitoring flight path parameters; specifically, pilot monitoring was assumed to be more effective than it actually is. Examples are provided of the types of alerting system failures that have occurred, and recommendations are provided for alerting system improvements.

Language: en