Crew resource management

Crew (or Cockpit) Resource Management (CRM) training originated from a NASA workshop in 1979 that focused on improving air safety. The NASA research presented at this meeting found that the primary cause of the majority of aviation accidents was human error, and that the main problems were failures of interpersonal communication, leadership, and decision making in the cockpit. A textbook example of such an event was the catastrophic accident of two years earlier, the infamous Tenerife disaster.

CRM training for crew has since been introduced and developed by aviation organisations including major airlines and military aviation worldwide. CRM training is now a mandated requirement for commercial pilots working under most regulatory bodies worldwide, including the FAA (U.S.) and JAA (Europe).

CRM training encompasses a wide range of knowledge, skills and attitudes including communications, situational awareness, problem solving, decision making, and teamwork; together with all the attendant sub-disciplines which each of these areas entails. CRM can be defined as a management system which makes optimum use of all available resources - equipment, procedures and people - to promote safety and enhance the efficiency of flight operations.

CRM is concerned not so much with the technical knowledge and skills required to fly and operate an aircraft but rather with the cognitive and interpersonal skills needed to manage the flight within an organised aviation system. In this context, cognitive skills are defined as the mental processes used for gaining and maintaining situational awareness, for solving problems and for taking decisions. Interpersonal skills are regarded as communications and a range of behavioural activities associated with teamwork. In aviation, as in other walks of life, these skill areas often overlap with each other, and they also overlap with the required technical skills. Furthermore, they are not confined to multi-crew aircraft, but also relate to single pilot operations, which invariably need to interface with other aircraft and with various ground support agencies in order to complete their missions successfully.

United Airlines Flight 232

Captain Al Haynes, pilot of United Airlines Flight 232, credits Crew Resource Management as being one of the factors that saved his own life, and many others, in the Sioux City Iowa Crash of July 1989. Source (Haynes' Eyewitness account): [1]

See also

• Tenerife disaster
• Sterile Cockpit Rule
• Line Oriented Flight Training
• Helmet fire

External links

• Evolution of CRM in pdf
• University of Texas Human Factors Research Project
• Crew Resource Management Current Regulatory Paper pdf