Aviation Safety Works

The study by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health discovered that the number of U.S. airline accidents due to pilot error "significantly declined" between 1983 and 2002. "A 40 percent decline in pilot error related mishaps is very impressive. Pilot error has long been considered the most prominent contributor to aviation crashes."

Susan Baker, the lead author of the study, attributes the significant decline in pilot error-related accidents to improvements in pilot training, flight deck technology and the development of Crew Resource Management (CRM) techniques. CRM is a crew coordination discipline that came into being in the 1980s and the FAA, the NTSB and all U.S. and major international airlines emphasize it strongly today.

"We saw a reduction in pilot error crashes where crew interaction was a factor. Trends indicate that great progress has been made to improve the decision-making of pilots and coordination between the aircraft's crew members."

Mishaps caused by poor crew interaction declined 68 percent from 2.8 to 0.9 per ten million departures.

"I would certainly attribute that to Crew Resource Management," she [Susan Baker] said. In the decade from 1987 to 1996, the fatal accident rate was six accidents per 10 million departures. However in the decade from 1997 to 2006, the rate fell to two fatal accidents per 10 million departures.

Susan Baker
Aviation, Space and Environmental Medicine
January 2008