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Effective Management Requires a Careful Balancing Act1
Courtesy ASRS, No. 10, Dec 98
Managing several tasks concurrently is an everyday part of cockpit operations. For the most part, crews handle concurrent task demands efficiently, yet crew preoccupation with one task to the detriment of other tasks is one of the more common forms of error in the cockpit. Most pilots are familiar with the December 1972 L-1011 crash that occurred when the crew became preoccupied with a landing gear light malfunction and failed to notice someone had inadvertently bumped off the autopilot. More recently, a DC-9 landed gear up...when the crew, preoccupied with an unstabilized approach, failed to recognize that the gear wasn't down because they hadn't switched the hydraulic pumps to high.
NASA has begun a research project to study why crews are vulnerable to these sorts of errors. As part of this project, we reviewed NTSB reports of accidents attributed to crew error. We concluded that nearly half of these accidents involved lapses of attention associated with interruptions, distractions, or preoccupation with one task to the exclusion of another task.
We have also analyzed 107 Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) reports involving competing tasks; we present here some of our conclusions from this review. The 107 ASRS reports involved 21 different types of routine tasks crews neglected at a critical moment while attending to another task. Sixty-nine percent of the neglected tasks involved either failure to monitor the current status or position of the aircraft or failure to monitor the actions of the pilot who was flying or taxiing.
Thirty-four different types of competing activities distracted or preoccupied the pilots. Ninety percent of these activities fell into one of four broad categories: (1) communication (e.g., discussion among crew or radio communication), (2) head-down work (e.g., programming the FMS or reviewing approach plates), (3) searching for VMC traffic, or (4) responding to abnormal situations.
We will discuss examples from each category and suggest preventive actions crews can take to reduce their vulnerability to these and similar situations. Our suggestions are not perfect fixes, but we hope they will be useful. It's likely that research will ultimately provide more powerful solutions.
Category 1
Communication
* "Copilot was a new hire and new in...