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August 2, 2014

Lessons from an air crash

The NTSB's investigation of an air crash at San Francisco airport during landing last year mentions that
"The board’s acting chairman, Chris Hart, warned that the accident underscores a problem that has long troubled aviation regulators around the globe — that increasingly complicated automated aircraft controls designed to improve safety are also creating new opportunities for error. 
The Asiana flight crew ‘‘over-relied on automated systems that they did not fully understand,’’ Hart said. 
‘‘In their efforts to compensate for the unreliability of human performance, the designers of automated control systems have unwittingly created opportunities for new error types that can be even more serious than those they were seeking to avoid,’’ he said. "
Read the article in this link. 

I am a firm believer of keeping it simple. Just because that vendors try to sell you a piece of "latest" technology, do not buy it unless you are convinced it will be useful for you. If the argument is that we need more automation systems as competency is going down, I would answer by saying, keep your systems simple so that your training programs become more effective!


Contribute to the surviving victims of Bhopal by buying my book "Practical Process Safety Management"

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