What is it about?
Airliners present a unique situation where effectively the supervisor is engaged in an active control task, rather than supervision where their superior experience and judgement can be utilised. In other complex situations (e.g. a ship's crew, military operations, control rooms) this task configuration is not the case, so it is necessary to see what influence this anomaly is having on safety in air transport, and why.
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Why is it important?
After many accidents caused by crew deficiencies in monitoring, situation awareness and decision making, the air transport industry has spent considerable effort on trying to improve the lower-ranked first officer's performance in the monitoring role. But this begs the question: why are we wanting the junior to supervise the senior? We may need to re-strategise and restructure how we do things in airliner flight decks to further improve safety in a more productive manner.
Perspectives
I have spent time in both positions in multi-crew flight decks, and understand these inadequacies with the status quo first-hand. I am aware of at least tacit acknowledgement and wisdom among experienced captains that it is often best to let the first officer fly the aircraft while they tend to the "big picture". In discussions on this topic I am now also aware of official recognition of this in certain parts of aviation e.g. military operations. We need to ask why we do things differently and be prepared to change some long standing paradigms to keep air transport the safest transport system.
Stuart Beveridge
University of New South Wales
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Command and Control, Aviation Psychology and Applied Human Factors, March 2018, Hogrefe Publishing Group,
DOI: 10.1027/2192-0923/a000130.
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