5.3 Discussion

Team Based Human Factors

October 5, 2021

    In the aviation world, especially for maintenance, Human Factors play a key role in the reasoning why redundancy is a must have. Human factors include emotions and different attitudes that can be changed based on the situation that arises. This plays a huge role when individuals are given tasks where decision-making and risk-management. Often times, the best type of leader is one who can put their emotions to the side and focus on the job or the mission, since basing a situation off emotions in a high risk job is very risky. In aviation, human factors means better understanding of how humans can efficiently and safely work with technology, this includes design, training, and procedures to help humans perform better (Boeing 2008). 

    Being on fighters my whole career, stress is a huge role in most if not every maintainer's work life. Reason being that jets fly very often and due to this, they break very often depending on the weather. Mistakes are more common to happen due to the work load and the demand given by the superior, although maintainers are always told to do it by the "speed of safe". This human factor of emotional stress has a huge role to play whenever big jobs are given out with very little time to finish it. The stress of helping your team while trying to satisfy the higher ups is a fine line and often times leads the supervisor to a very high tense situation where the often times makes them forget about the small things required for the job. 

    The best way to solve this stressful challenge for maintainers is to give the workers more time to do their job without the feeling that they are being rushed. Often times, even if the jet is fixed, it will come back with the same problem due to the job not being done right and by the book since the maintainer was told to hurry and "green up the jet" while not having enough time or resources to do it right the first time. The idea of cowboy maintenance needs to stop and doing right and by the book the first time is the only way to decrease the workload for the maintainers. 

References:

Boeing. (2008). Human Factors. https://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_08/human_textonly.html

Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). (2016). Pilot’s Handbook of Aeronautical 

            Knowledge (PHAK). Retrieved

            https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/aviation/phak

HSE. (n.d.). Introduction to human factors. Health and Safety Executive. https://www.hse.gov.uk/humanfactors/introduction.htm