A New Approach Toward Diagnosing Military Aircraft Accidents
Lee Friedman, Dennis K. Leedom, William C. Howell · Military Psychology · 1991
Current systems for reporting military aircraft accidents rely heavily on causal checklists. Such catalog systems risk missing the underlying dynamics or structure by which the classified acts are organized into causal patterns or sequences. Alternative possibilities for accident description are reviewed. An approach designed to provide the descriptive information necessary for devising intervention strategies-the descriptive synopsis-is introduced. The theoretical foundation and the actual procedural details of this technique are presented. Findings indicate that aviation experts, using the descriptive synopsis independently, agree on the extent to which a number of human abilities are required to preclude an accident, as well as the extent to which several task characteristics pertain to the accident situation. The potential of this approach to anticipate accident-producing situations and to suggest interventions is explored.