ABSTRACT
Fault management gone awry rarely has disastrous consequences in commercial aviation. Fault management in aviation must be discussed within its operational context in order to understand the richness and complexity of the information processing and physical activities that must be performed. Systems on aircraft have tremendous reliability and built-in redundancy. Improved fault management must be grounded in an understanding of human performance and the operational environment in which pilots and automation together must perform fault management. Human performance in fault management can be described from a variety of perspectives. The fault management framework presented integrates: the operational levels within which real-time fault management occurs, cognitive control levels, information processing stages, and the definition of fault management as a set of operational tasks. Fault management involves diverse threads of activity among the various operational levels, and pilots must allocate attention to each fault management task and each operational level, and integrate these with performance of other normal flight crew activity threads.
