ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses incident reports that are submitted voluntarily and confidentially. Its aims to facilitate the use of incident data as a rich source of information in aeronautical human factors, and to promote the use by policy makers and human factors practitioners, resulting in an increase in aviation safety. Incident data have been used by human factors professionals to create cockpit and air traffic operating procedures, display and control design, and to better understand basic human performance associated with the operation of aircraft and air traffic control. Aeronautical human factors studies begin by setting the scope of the project. Many statistical techniques customarily employed in the human factors field, such as analysis of variance, are not appropriate for use with voluntarily submitted incident data. Organizations throughout the world collect incident reports that are available to those concerned with human factors.
