ABSTRACT
A longitudinal analysis of human error in maritime accidents in Canada and the US showed that fewer accidents were attributed to human errors than suggested elsewhere in the literature and that factors such as managerial and regulatory context of maritime operations played a role (Johnson & Holloway 2008). Two analyses from the Norwegian petroleum sector suggest that the majority of causal factors were in the organizational domain, while the number of operator errors that contributed to the analyzed accidents and incidents were small (Aas 2008; Aas 2009). Thus it appears that not only the complexity of humans themselves, but also the complex interaction between humans, technology and organization should be in focus when trying to understand human error.
