ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces key considerations for integrating Human Factors (HF) into engineering processes for flight deck design and certification. It summarises essential concepts and provides recommendations to students. Most aerospace companies follow well-established engineering processes. However, aligning the required HF activities with an engineering environment is often challenging. Planning HF activities in flight deck design and certification begins by identifying the project scope and determining the required level of HF scrutiny for the examination. Choosing the right approach and methods for design, analysis, and evaluations/tests ensures that all HF aspects are appropriately addressed throughout the development cycle, from ideation via maturation to certification. This requires understanding key characteristics of human properties and how they are translated into criteria for assessing designs across essential HF aspects, including information processing, task integration and execution, workload, automation, situation awareness, and human error. Following a structured HF process helps to collect the evidence needed to demonstrate compliance with applicable certification and operational regulations, which have significantly evolved over the past few decades to better address HF. However, changes come with risks; therefore, this chapter closes with potential pitfalls encountered during the integration of HF into engineering processes, as well as an outlook on future challenges.
