Crew Resource Management

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The Crew (formerly Cockpit ) Resource Management -Training (CRM) is a training course for aircraft crews , which aims to train and improve the non-technical skills in order to prevent aircraft accidents due to human error . It is about cooperation, situational awareness, leadership behavior and decision-making as well as the associated communication. An important part of CRM is the division of tasks and the agreement about who takes on which tasks. For example, one crew member takes on solving a technical problem, while the other pilot controls the aircraft.

background

Before the introduction of the CRM concept, accident investigators found time and again that the pilots had perfect technical or flying skills, but that the cooperation between the master and the lower-ranking first officer was often inadequate. With reference to his higher number of years of service and his authority, the flight captain ironed out concerns of the first officer in many accidents and stuck to his decisions. Likewise, a lack of willingness to make decisions and assign tasks led to some accidents.

CRM emerged from a NASA workshop in December (?) 1979, which aimed to increase flight safety. The NASA investigations showed that the main reason for serious aircraft accidents was human error and the main problems were communication on board, conflicts of competence within the crew and, in some cases, the weakness of the pilots' decision-making. The following accidents in particular led to the introduction of CRM:

  • The crash of Eastern Air Lines Flight 401 in December 1972:
    All three members of the cockpit crew were hit by a faulty control light and tried to solve this problem together. Nobody noticed the switched off autopilot and the steady descent.
  • The plane disaster in Tenerife in March 1977:
    Concerns of the flight engineer and the first officer about whether the other machine had already left the runway or whether a take-off clearance had actually been given by the control tower were rejected by the captain.
  • The crash of United Airlines Flight 173 in December 1978 was similar to Eastern Air Lines Flight 401:
    The decision to abort the landing due to a landing gear problem and to prepare for an emergency landing was correct; however, no one calculated the remaining flight time, and no one noticed the imminent lack of fuel.

After the crash of Flight 173, a conference organized by NASA and the aviation industry took place from June 26 to 28, 1979 to discuss the advantages and the introduction of crew resource management in the light of these accidents. Since then, CRM training has revolutionized aircraft crew training around the world.

CRM has also found its way into the training of one-man crews ("Single-Pilot Crew Resource Management"), which is much more about the active control of one's own workload, decision-making and the targeted use of automation (autopilot, navigation aids and the like) goes. CRM was also introduced outside of aviation, for example in medicine, where treatment errors are often recognized by lower-ranking doctors and nurses, in the training of mountain guides and mountain tour guides, or ship crews. Elements of CRM were taken up earlier, for example when preparing the American expedition to Mount K2 in 1953. Instead of top mountaineers, the expedition leaders selected all-rounders and team players. After the expedition had been caught in a storm at 7,800 meters for more than a week, they had to descend with a seriously ill member. The fact that the expedition only ended with one death is often attributed to the successful group dynamics.

As stipulated in the JAR-OPS , the CRM training is binding for aircraft crews in commercial and military aviation and must be repeated after three years at the latest. CRM is intended to raise awareness of the fact that, in addition to technical understanding on board an aircraft (technical skills), communication and relationships between the members of the crew are also crucial in order to master critical situations. An important element of CRM is the use and dissemination of all important information within the crew, both between the pilots and in the interaction between the cockpit and cabin crew .

The CRM training has been further developed by both aviation authorities and airlines over time, now also includes training content for cabin crews in order to optimize cooperation and communication between cockpit and cabin and is now mandatory for all pilots and flight attendants who work for the FAA (USA ) and JAA (Europe).

Content and goals of a CRM training

The crew resource management of a competent team can be described as follows:

  • Communication: The ability of crew members to give clear and precise orders and information, and to provide useful feedback .
  • Briefing, mission planning : To create action plans taking into account all resources, activities and information flows, in such a way that all tasks are completed in an integrated and synchronized manner.
  • Supportive behavior: To anticipate the needs of the other participants, through precise knowledge of the respective areas of responsibility and tasks. The crew must also be able to reallocate tasks during a heavy workload.
  • Mutual Observation: The ability to monitor the performance of other team members by providing, soliciting and receiving feedback.
  • Team leadership : The leader of the group leads and coordinates the activities of the crew, encourages the group members to work together and assesses the respective performance. He ensures that the team has a good level of knowledge and skills. He motivates, plans and organizes, and he ensures a positive working atmosphere in the crew.
  • Decision-making: The crew members are able to collect and share information with one another. They make logical and understandable decisions, and they identify alternative courses of action and their consequences. Based on this, they decide on the best course of action.

Examples

Successful CRM

  • Flight captain Al Haynes, pilot of United Airlines Flight 232 , said the CRM saved his life and that of many other passengers when his DC-10 crash-landed in Sioux City in 1989.
  • The ditching of US Airways flight 1549 on the Hudson River in 2009 was successful only through the functioning CRM by providing both pilots.
  • The five-person crew of Qantas flight 32 in 2010, who divided tasks, supported each other in processing the numerous ECAM messages, and opened a single point of contact for flight attendants and passengers, demonstrated successful CRM.

Bad or nonexistent CRM

  • Air France flight 447 (June 1, 2009): some time after take-off, the captain left the cockpit to take a break and entrusted the flight to the two first officers. There was no clarity among them as to who was responsible for the flight. After the speed measurement failed for a short time, neither of the pilots communicated the problem to the other in a clear manner. Also, nobody had worked through the “Unreliable Airspeed Indication” procedure according to the checklist.
  • An important case study in terms of crew resource management is the B-52 crash at Fairchild Air Force Base in June 1994. Various Air Force officers failed to report or sanction the daring flight maneuvers of the pilot Bud Holland, which led to a proverbial "culture of uncertainty": Anyone who wanted to complain about risky maneuvers could not expect to be taken seriously, which was a free pass for Holland .
  • Alitalia flight 404 (November 14, 1990): An instrument of the first officer indicated that the approach was too low, that of the master not. However, the master reversed the go - around maneuver initiated by the first officer without checking the situation. Since then, a landing that has been aborted cannot be reversed; the crew must take off and restart the approach.
  • Another negative example is British Midland Flight 092 on January 8, 1989, when the right, intact engine was inadvertently shut down after damage to the left engine . The latter had generated strong vibrations under full load , which is why the master of the machine mistakenly considered the right engine to be damaged. Although it was clear to the cabin crew, among other things, which of the two engines was malfunctioning, this important information was not transmitted to the commander and was not obtained by him. The machine hit 900 meters from the runway . 49 people did not survive the crash.
  • Scandinavian Airlines System Flight 933 (January 13, 1969): The crew took care of a defective control lamp for the nose landing gear. The request from air traffic control to fly as slowly as possible contributed to this disaster insofar as a very low airspeed is only possible when the flaps are fully extended - which in turn was only possible when the landing gear is extended. Due to the lack of task sharing, none of the pilots noticed that the flight altitude was too low; the machine crashed into the sea off Los Angeles.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ According to the document available on the NASA website "Resource management on the flight deck, Proceedings of a NASA / Industry Workshop, Held at San Francisco, California June 26-28, 1979", this workshop took place in June, although almost all of them other sources quote December.
  2. ↑ https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19800013796.pdf
  3. ^ Cooper, White & Lauber (editors, 1980): Resource management on the flightdeck: Proceedings of a NASA / industry workshop . San Francisco. June 1979.
  4. ↑ Kurt Winkler, Hans-Peter Brehm, Jürg Haltmeier: Mountain sports summer: technology, tactics, safety . Chapter Planning & Deciding . SAC-Verlag, Swiss Alpine Club, 3rd revised edition, 2011. ISBN 978-3-859-02280-5
  5. ^ Charles Houston / Robert Bates: K2 - The Savage Mountain . ISBN 978-1-58574-013-0 .
  6. ^ Salas, Prince, Bowers, Stout, Oser and Cannon-Bowers (1999): A methodology for enhancing crew management training . In: Human Factors , 41: 163.
  7. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from October 26, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / yarchive.net
  8. ^ Accident Report NTSB / AAR-10/03 . In: National Transportation Safety Board . January 15, 2009 (PDF; 6 MB). Page 91 (or 108 of 213 pages in the file).