Editor's Notebook

Towards a Useful Human Factors Program

For all of its inertia, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is doing some good, creative, and useful things about human factors in maintenance. Two projects are especially worth noting.

A calendar has been produced for 2007 that features the "dirty dozen" human factors in maintenance. Because many maintenance technicians like to carry a calendar in their shirt pocket, the FAA has designed the "dirty dozen" calendar to fit the pocket. Each month features one of the dirty dozen factors, a timely and succinct reminder in a usable form (see examples, left).

Each FAA Safety Team (FAAST) regional manager will have the calendars for distribution. Anyone interested in obtaining a calendar (or calendars) should contact their local Flight Standards District Office (FSDO), who can put them in touch with their regional FAAST manager.

For more substance, the FAA has also produced and updated, as of March 3, 2006, a handy "Human Factors in Aviation Maintenance" operator's manual. While the literature on human error in maintenance would easily fill a bookshelf, this document distills the collective wisdom into just 22 pages. And they're organized logically, each chapter beginning with a photograph and quotation from a National Transportation Safety Board or other source illustrating a breakdown in human factors. The individual chapters are a model of brevity and succinctness:

Event Investigation
Documentation
Human Factors Training
Shift/Task Turnover
Fatigue Management
Sustaining & Justifying an HF Program

This blessedly brief but trenchant manual is available at www.hf.faa.gov/opsmanual/nav.aspx.

As the chapter on HF program sustainment indicates, the programs "often get off to a good start but then struggle over time." Among the tips in this chapter: "Programs must be sustained long enough to collect measurement data and demonstrate a Return on Investment (ROI)."

Amen to that. And while the data is being collected (and acted upon) over time to demonstrate ROI, the calendar provides handy reminders of the "dirty dozen" human factors in maintenance that can lead to costly mistakes.