ABSTRACT
The ability to make timely appropriate and effective decisions is an essential competence required of all fighter pilots, but until recently the training of decision-making remained unstructured and the quality of aeronautical decision-making (ADM) has been viewed as a by-product of flying experience in military aviation. This investigation applies the Human Factor Analysis and Classification System (HFACS) (Wiegmann & Shappell, 1997) and focuses only on those factors associated with decision errors. HFACS categorizes human error at four levels including (1) unsafe acts of operators, (2) preconditions for unsafe acts, (3) unsafe supervision, (4) organizational influences. The purpose of this study was to identify the role of decision errors in aviation mishaps in the R.O.C. Air Force. There were 1714 human causal factors associated with 519 aircrew-related accidents between 1978 and 2002. The overall analyses found that decision errors were implicated in 217 of the 519 (43%) accidents. The results indicate that ’inadequate supervision’ was a key element of accidents which involved human error. ‘Inadequate supervision’ has significant association with the upper level of ‘organizational influences’ and the lower level of ‘preconditions for unsafe acts’ which have a significant association with ‘decision errors’. In addition, the study findings highlighted critical safety issues in need of further research for developing the training of aeronautical decision-making in military operations.
