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
variety of CRM models have been successfully adapted to different
types of industries and organizations, all based on the same basic
concepts and principles. It has recently been adopted by the fire
service to help improve
situational awareness on the
fireground.
Overview
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,
cognitiveskills are defined as the mental processes used for
gaining and maintaining situational awareness, for solving problems
and for making decisions. Interpersonal skills are regarded as
communications and a range of behavioural activities associated
withteamwork. 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.
CRM training for crew has 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). Following the lead of
the commercial airline industry, the U.S. Department of Defense
began formally training its air crews in CRM in the early 1990s.
Presently, the U.S. Air Force requires all air crew members to
receive annual CRM training, in an effort to reduce to human-error
caused mishaps.
Communication
CRM fosters a climate or culture where the freedom to respectfully
question authority is encouraged. However, the primary goal of CRM
is not enhanced communication, but rather enhanced
situational awareness. It recognizes
that a discrepancy between what is happening and what should be
happening is often the first indicator that an error is occurring.
This is a delicate subject for many organizations, especially ones
with traditional hierarchies, so appropriate communication
techniques must be taught to supervisors and their subordinates, so
that supervisors understand that the questioning of authority need
not be threatening, and subordinates understand the correct way to
question orders.
Cockpit voice recordings of various air disasters tragically reveal
first officers and flight engineers attempting to bring critical
information to the captain's attention in an indirect and
ineffective way. By the time the captain understood what was being
said, it was too late to avert the disaster. A CRM expert named
Todd Bishop developed a five-step assertive statement process that
encompasses inquiry and advocacy steps :
- Opening or attention getter - Address the
individual. "Hey Chief," or "Captain Smith," or "Bob," or whatever
name or title will get the person's attention.
- State your concern - State what you see in a
direct manner while owning your emotions about it. "We're low on
fuel," or "I think we might have fire extension into the roof
structure."
- State the problem as you see it - "I don't
think we have enough fuel to fly around this storm system," or
"This building has a lightweight steel truss roof. I'm worried that
it might collapse."
- State a solution - "Let's divert to another
airport and refuel," or "I think we should pull some tiles and take
a look with the thermal imaging camera before we commit crews
inside."
- Obtain agreement (or buy-in) - "Does that
sound good to you, Captain?"
These are difficult skills to master, as they require a change in
interpersonal dynamics and organizational culture.
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.
- ...the preparation that paid off for the crew was something
... called Cockpit Resource Management.... Up until 1980,
we kind of worked on the concept that the captain was THE authority
on the aircraft. What he said, goes. And we lost
a few airplanes because of that. Sometimes the captain
isn't as smart as we thought he was. And we would listen
to him, and do what he said, and we wouldn't know what he's talking
about. And we had 103 years of flying experience there in
the cockpit, trying to get that airplane on the ground, not one
minute of which we had actually practiced, any one of us.
So why would I know more about getting that airplane on the
ground under those conditions than the other three. So if
I hadn't used [CRM], if we had not let everybody put their input
in, it's a cinch we wouldn't have made it.
Evolution
The basic concepts and ideology that make CRM successful with
aviation air crews have also proven successful with other related
career fields. Several commercial aviation firms, as well as
international aviation safety agencies, began expanding CRM into
air traffic control, aircraft design, and aircraft maintenance in
the 1990s. Specifically, the aircraft maintenance section of this
training expansion gained traction as
Maintenance Resource
Management . In an effort to standardize the industry wide
training of this team-based safety approach, the
FAA (U.S.) issued Advisory Circular 120-72, Maintenance
Resource Management Training in September 2000.
Following a study of aviation mishaps over the 10-year period
1992-2002, the
United States Air
Force determined that close to 18% of its aircraft mishaps were
directly attributable to maintenance human error (source, U.S. Air
Force Safety Center). Unlike the more immediate impact of air crew
error, maintenance human errors often occurred long before the
flight where the problems were discovered. These "latent errors"
included such mistakes as failure to follow published aircraft
manuals, lack of assertive communication among maintenance
technicians, poor supervision, and improper assembly practices. In
2005, to specifically address these maintenance human error-induced
root causes of aircraft mishaps, Lt Col Doug Slocum, Chief of
Safety at the Air National Guard's 162nd Fighter Wing, Tucson, AZ,
modified his base's CRM program into a military version of
MRM.
In mid-2005, the
Air National
Guard Aviation Safety Division converted Slocum's MRM program
into a national program available to the Air National Guard's 88
flying wings, spread across 54 U.S. states and territories.
In 2006,
the Defense Safety Oversight Council (DSOC) of the U.S.
Department of
Defense recognized the mishap prevention value of this
maintenance safety program by partially funding a variant of ANG
MRM for training throughout the U.S. Air Force. This ANG
initiated, DoD-funded version of MRM became known as Air Force
Maintenance Resource Management, AF-MRM, and is now widely used in
the U.S. Air Force.
See also
References
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