ABSTRACT
The origins of this volume lie in a workshop held in 1993 on human factors aspects of certification, the proceedings of which were published with limited circulation and are now out of print (Wise, Hopkin, & Garland, 1994). This workshop in its turn had several origins. Three deserve particular mention. One origin was a meeting and text on verification and validation (Wise, Hopkin, & Stager, 1993), which was unable to deal fully with the topics of verification and validation without raising certification issues. As second origin of the workshop was the inclusion in the orginal comprehensive first draft of the United States National Plan for Aviation Human Factors in 1989 of a recommended detailed program of human factors work on certification issues. This program was not pursued at its initial detailed level, and, together with the other parts of the initial document, it was condensed greatly before the official version of the National Plan was finally issued (Federal Aviation Administration[FAA], 1995). The third origin of the workshop was the recognition and treatment of certification as a human job, with the consequence that the application of human factors principles to it should offer prospects of benefits, because human factors is the main discipline applied to people at work to improve what they achieve, how they achieve it, and how the work affects them personally.
