Those who cannot remember the past of human factors are doomed to repeat it…
With apologies to the philosopher George Santayana, I’ll make the point that the BMW Head Up Display technology is in fact not the unalloyed blessing premised by BMW in their marketing material.
Occasional readers of this blog might have noticed my preoccupation with unreliable airspeed and the human factors and system design issues that attend it. So it was with some interest that I read the recent paper by Sathy Silva of MIT and Roger Nicholson of Boeing on aviation accidents involving unreliable airspeed.
The Buncefield report: Or overlooking the obvious
Why sometimes simpler is better in safety engineering.
I’ve just finished up the working week with a day long Safety Conversations and Observations course conducted by Dr Robert Long of Human Dymensions. A good, actually very good, course with an excellent balance between the theory of risk psychology and the practicalities of successfully carrying out safety conversations. I’d recommend it to any organisation that’s seeking to take their safety culture beyond systems and paperwork. Although he’s not a great fan of engineers. 
In a recent NRCOHSR white paper on the Deeepwater Horizon explosion Professor Andrew Hopkins of the Australian National University argued that the Transocean and BP management teams that were visiting the rig on the day of the accident failed to detect the unsafe well condition because of biases in their audit practices.
Stage Separation – A Classic Irreversible Command
The concept of irreversible commands is one that has been around for a long time in the safety and aerospace communities, but why are they significant from a safety perspective?
Airbuses side stick improves crew comfort and control, but is there a hidden cost?
The Airbus FBW side stick flight control has vastly improved the comfort of aircrew flying the Airbus fleet, much as the original Airbus designers predicted (Corps, 188). But the implementation also expresses the Airbus approach to flight control laws and that companies implicit assumption about the way in which humans interact with automation and each other. Here the record is more problematic.
This post is part of the Airbus aircraft family and system safety thread.
I tend towards the integrative rather than reductionist view of engineering and science. I'm interested in emergence, networks, relationships and interfaces as they apply to safety.
