Human Factors in Transport

Running Head: HUMAN FACTORS IN TRANSPORT
HUMAN FACTORS IN TRANSPORT
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HUMAN FACTORS IN TRANSPORT1
News Story 1
Pilots were not to blame for 737 crash
The aviation industry provides people with the safest kind of travel as compared to
transportation on land or water. With air traffic constantly being monitored and radars busy
with making sure that the flights sty on their path and fly at a certain height to avoid midair
crashes or any other accident, accidents are very uncommon and rare (Legett, 2019).
However, one must also consider that if there is an accident, survival rate of hundreds of
passengers on board is almost zero.
Despite the high end technologies being used to regulate flights in various countries
and abroad, after making sure international aviation experts work hand in hand to make sure a
flight lands safely after taking off the runway. This brings us to the human factors that
determine how safe a flight is, the operators, the manufacturers of planes, the decision
makers, the ground staff, the cabin crew and most importantly the pilots. The scope of
committing a mistake is very little given the high level of expertise required to control this
industry and mistakes are unaffordable because it will inevitably lead to mass accidents with
a survival rate that is nil.
The flight ET302 went down shortly after takeoff and caused a loss of 157 lives. The
Ethiopian Airlines Flight involved A Max Jet Model which had crashed in October. It was a
Lion Air Flight 610 which took off from Jakarta in Indonesia, with 189 people on board, all
of them perished. The airline’s chief executive said that the pilots were not at fault that leads
to the question, who was?
Human error in this context, although unclear, is being directed towards the Boing
administration. A stakeholder noted “We don’t have to have 300-plus people die every
time to find out that something is unreliable.” On investigation of the black box it was found

HUMAN FACTORS IN TRANSPORT2
that there was a similarity with the black box of the previous crash which noted a faulty
sensor which caused the fight control system to deploy late unlike what an US congressman
claimed about the pilots being at fault.
The pilots left no scope for errors, according to investigation, they had followed the
procedures perfectly. The control system of the plane was such that it operates under a set of
specific circumstances however, the accident was caused due to the plane control system
which is known as the MCAS countering and overriding the commands of the pilot and
forcing the nose downwards. However, Boeing claims that there are methods of deactivating
the control system to give pilots the control they require in each case, and the pilots need to
be informed of the same beforehand.
The human factor that was responsible for the crash was the administration of Boeing
for not passing over enough information to the pilots about the steps that need to be taken to
override the systems (Belcastro & Foster, 2010). However, they have not yet grounded the
flights with the same system. What good is a system if it has to be disabled? The blame is on
Boeing that despite the previous plane crash at Jakarta, no step was taken to ensure it does not
happen again.
The Boeing Chief communicated that, "Clearly, we can make improvements, and we
understand that and we will make those improvements." After grounding the model and
hopes that 737 Max will return to service soon. The human factor in this case was that of
human error. Sanders and McCormick (1993) provide a system-oriented definition of human
error: an inappropriate or undesirable human decision or behavior that reduces, or has the
potential for reducing, effectiveness, safety, or system performance.