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Aircrew Resources Management

Introduction There are many reasons why those involved with the airline safety commit errors that on occasion lead to the injury or death of innocent people - people who had every right to expect better of their caretakers. Such accidents can be traced to many broad categories. Categories such as weather, mechanical malfunction, terrorist acts or into what may be termed ‘acts of God’. Apart from these, perhaps the most important and the fundamental category are errors attributed to the ‘human factor’ such as sheer carelessness, inexperience, personality flaws, fatigue, in adequate training or inadequate operating instructions. However, the irony aspect of this issue is that in most of the cases, accidents were resulted from the performance error made by healthy and properly qualified individuals though it is a somewhat ambiguous term and is in our haste to attribute an accident to somebody - the pilot. Over the past decade, one of the most striking developments in aviation safety has been the overwhelming endorsement and widespread implementation of training programs aimed at “Human Factor” to increasing the effectiveness of crew coordination and well being of crew resource management. (Human Factor Digest No.1, 1989)

Crew Resource Management Crew Resource Management (CRM) training has become an integral part of many training programs for the pilots and other aviation personnel. Wiener, Kanki and Helmreich (1993) have defined CRM as ‘using all available resources - information, equipment, and people - to achieve safe and efficient flight operations’ (p.4, 1993). Thus, training in CRM involves communicating basic knowledge of human factor concepts that relates to aviation such as leadership, effective team formation and maintenance, problem solving, decision-making, and maintaining situation awareness. One of the most important keys to good crew management, as in much management position is communication among the crew members. Information must be requested, offered and/ or given freely in a timely way to permit the captain to make accurate, effective decisions. It also requires an understanding of communication styles used by other members of the crew for interpretation and to determine the proper emphasis for a response. Finally, it requires an understanding and acceptance of the unique role and the leadership responsibility of each of the crew members. Therefore, the primary emphasis in CRM training is in interpersonal communications. (Jensen, 1995) Communication and Resources Robbins, (1998) referred communication to a process where information is transmitted between two or more people. (p.345, 1998) However, effective communication is essential for the safe operation of flight as operating modern aircraft is a high-stakes profession with lives invested in every flight. And messages can be transferring by speech, by the written word, by a variety of symbols and displays (e.g. instruments, CRT, maps) or by non-verbal means such as gestures and body language. There are three elements in t