Why Competent Crews Crash
Human factors for people who read accident reports
Around half of all accidents get filed under human error, a statistic that explains nothing. This course covers what is actually happening when a current, qualified crew does something that later looks incomprehensible: startle, attention, mental models of the automation, the social physics of a two-person cockpit, and fatigue.
Lessons
- 1The pilot error trapFreeWhy 'human error' is the beginning of an explanation, and what local rationality and hindsight bias do to a reader.11 min
- 2Startle, surprise and the first few secondsFreeTwo different phenomena that get conflated. One recovers on its own; the other has to be worked through before any action can be right.12 min
- 3Attention, workload and the thing nobody sawA fixed budget, a predictable shedding order, and why monitoring is a genuinely difficult job rather than spare capacity.15 min
- 4Mental models and automation surpriseMode awareness is the load-bearing element of a modern flight deck. What happens when the crew's model and the aircraft diverge.15 min
- 5CRM and the authority gradientHow information fails to travel between two people who both have it, and the structures that fix it without relying on courage.14 min
- 6Fatigue and the body clockWhy fatigue is easy to suspect and hard to establish, and what a report that handles it properly actually contains.13 min
- 7Reading human factors in a reportWhere the material lives, how the Swiss cheese model and HFACS get misused, and the single sharpest test of a report's seriousness.15 min
Assessment
The course ends with 20 questions. They are application rather than recall: most give you something in the shape of report language and ask what it does and does not establish. Every answer comes back explained and pointing at the lesson it came from.
75% or better produces a completion record — a dated page showing the course and your score, which you can link to. It is a record of having done the reading, not a professional certification, and it does not pretend to be one.