MAINTENANCE HUMAN FACTORS
Keven Baines, managing director of Baines
Simmons Limited.
Image credit: Baines Simmons Limited.
Image credit: C Weirauch
Human Factors Training -
Value Adding Or Ticking
The Box?
Keven Baines, managing director of Baines Simmons Limited, an
international airworthiness and safety solutions consultancy, offers a
perspective on the application of EASA Part 145 regulations for
maintenance human factors. The article is based on a presentation
given to the Royal Aeronautical Society in London.
Research in the late nineties
revealed that between 70% and
80% of all aircraft accidents
were due to human error. In a significant
number of these, maintenance error was at
the very least, a significant contributing
factor. From the regulators’ perspective a
reduction in the hull loss accident rate was
the motivator for employing human factors
(HF) programmes in maintenance.
However, the average aviation maintenance executive manager who has not
received error management focussed HF
training, is unlikely to be motivated to
ensure anything other than regulatory
compliance.
The EASA Part 145.A.30 (e) regulation
presented just such an opportunity, but
many maintenance organisations failed to
seize it because they went for the ‘tick box’
approach to HF training. This might be a
significant missed opportunity for both the
European regulator (EASA) and the maintenance organisation in terms of return on
investment. Maintenance organisations
that went down the ‘one size fits all’ path
regarding HF training, are highly unlikely to
be able to deliver, either in terms of the
regulator’s return on investment (ROI) goal,
or the real potential business benefits that
we see (some more enlightened maintenance organisations) enjoying. Moreover
this lost opportunity may well have cost the
European aviation maintenance industry
millions of euros.
Why are the executive management
so pivotal in making the whole HF movement deliver? Those maintenance organisations, which have real value-adding HF
programmes, are those whose executive
management teams understand what the
potential ROI prize is. As such, they genuinely want an HF programme, not simply
their staff to be trained in HF. That prize is
a window into the bottom of the ‘error iceberg’. Such a window offers the proactive
ability to manage those on-going, near
miss events that continue to reveal hitherto
latent risk and massive rework costs to any
maintenance organisation.
Because near-miss events are more
frequent than incidents or accidents, these
non-output failure reports are amenable to
statistical analysis in a way that accident
reports are not. Additionally, incident /
near-miss reporting systems help to keep
everyone focused on safety issues. A
reporting culture is a key measure of an
efficient HF programme; if you have 100
30 CAT MAGAZINE ı ISSUE 5/2007
