ABSTRACT
Throughout this book, we have stressed the importance for aviation safety of going beyond the individual 'human factor' to embrace the task, situational and organizational factors that shape 'sharp end' performance. It is our contention that the purely psychological influences upon the reliability of skilled behaviour (e.g. preoccupation, distraction, misperception, momentary forgetting, and the like) are the last and least manageable elements in the sequence of events contributing to the errors of pilots, air traffic controllers and maintenance engineers.
