Aeroplane Safety Assurance Processes

Human errors continue to dominate as a contributing factor in aircraft accidents (see Annex A to this chapter). A Boeing study (2001) found that flight crew errors are listed as the primary cause in 66% of accidents and that despite the introduction of protective devices or systans, this percentage has remained relatively unchanged in recent years. An FAA study (2002) into Aeroplane Safety Assurance Processes concluded that the processes used to determine and vahdate human responses to failure and methods to include human responses in safety assessments need to be improved and that the industry challenge is to develop aeroplanes and procedures that are less likely to result in operator error and that are more tolerant to operator error when they do occur . 

Verification (refer Fig. 1.3) is the evaluation of an implementafion of requirements to determine that they have been met (i.e. Did we build the thing right Finding 3 in the FAA study (2002) into Aeroplane Safety Assurance Processes concluded that A more robust...process that challenges the assumptions made in the safety analysis of flight critical functions is necessary in situations where a few flight critical failures (2 or 3) could result in catastrophic events. ... 

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