Essay Example on Humans in Aviation: Combining Tech & Training for Success

Introduction

Despite fast growth in technology, humans are, in the end, responsible for ensuring the success and safety of the aviation industry. In aviation, human factors are committed to a more significant interpretation of how individuals can safely and efficiently combine with technology (Dumitru & Boscoianu, 2015). This interpretation is then translated into training policies, designs, and procedures to help individuals perform better.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Individuals in the aviation industry are required to continue being knowledgeable, flexible, efficient, and dedicated while exercising good judgment. Since technology continues to evolve much faster than the ability to predict how individuals will interact with it, aviation industries are unable to depend much on individual experience and instincts to guide resolutions related to human performance.

Importance of Personnel Selection and Training in Human Factors

Personnel selection is an essential function of an organization because the success of an organization is always dependent on the quality of individuals selected for the job. It helps in hiring the desirable candidates improving the success and safety of individuals selected at the workplace (Wise et al, 2016). In personnel selection, the process used to hire individuals with the required qualification, skills, competence, and knowledge to fill a vacant or new position in an organization should be professional to reduce any risks or accidents caused by humans.

The personnel selection process is a means used by the management to differentiate between qualified and unqualified applicants by using different techniques (Wise et al, 2016).Although it is a negative process because only the eligible get the opportunity, it aims at choosing the most suitable individual whose contribution will be the most valuable to the organization. By choosing the right person with skills required by the organization, accidents occurring from human technical error are reduced.

Training enables individuals to understand and have proper personal resource skills to add to their technical training. Individuals must continue to be knowledgeable and efficient, organizations no longer depend much on experiences and intuitions to guide their workers' performance, so they make significant investments in training that has long-term implications (Wise et al, 2016). Besides having the right knowledge and skills, constant updates of the ever-changing technology are required, regular training of individuals will lead to safer and more efficient task performance.

Most organizations spend so much on training its workers; correct personnel selection reduces this cost of training because the qualified individuals selected will find it easy to acquire the techniques of the job. In personnel selection stages, the management may reject candidates when their knowledge and skills do not match with that of the organization (Wise et al, 2016). Therefore, a proper selection is required to ensure a successful selection procedure.

For a successful selection, the organization should consider, the number of applicants is sufficient to make it easy to choose the best candidate. The persons selected by the organization to select candidates should be based on the type of candidates to be selected. Finally, a precise job specification should be developed before the selection process, which will is used to compare the candidate's skills, knowledge, and abilities.

Eugene Kranz and His Initial Impact on Human Factors

Eugene Kranz is an American aerospace engineer, a retired NASA flight director, and a former flight pilot. He served in different spots in NASA, including the second chief flight director of NASA. He directed both missions of the Gemini and Apollo programs, which includes the first lunar landing mission (Shayler & Burgess, 2017). He is known for directing several successful tasks, including his efforts in the mission control team that saved the crew of Apollo 13.

Kranz's impact on human factor came by when he was the leader of white flight team, which was one of the flight control teams during the Apollo 13 mission (Shayler et al, 2017). Although the mission was not successful, and they did not achieve their primary objective, but to Eugene, the human factor was seen when they rescued the Apollo 13 astronauts.

According to Kranz, the human factor is mainly responsible for controlling teams that helped put astronauts in the moon. The human factor that included the blend of young, intelligent workers working around the clock through determination gave the right results. Kranz also recognized the teams that developed the emergency plan as a human factor for their creativity and hard work, which has led to more research on human factor.

The Balance Maintained Between Resilience and Stability

Resilience is the concept of how systems respond to a stressor or disturbance. While stability refers to the disruption, the system faces. If the interference is significant, then the system becomes relatively unstable, and when there is a small disturbance, the system is relatively stable (Hoffman, & Hancock, 2017).

Often resilience is viewed as a good thing when human beings are resilient, they are quite capable of standing up to the disturbance they are facing. For a system to sustain any particular state, it cannot experience interference that exceeds its resilience.

As technology advances, the system becomes more complex to exceed the capacity limits of human operators, and they become unable to maintain the complexity of the operations leading to accidents due to human error. In balancing resilience and stability, human factors are considered nowadays in the standard requirement in designing any socio-technical system, which reduces the probability that human error may cause any severe accident.

The balance maintained between resilience and stability is achieved when a system is flexible so that its ability to restructure whenever it faces a disturbance or constant changes is capable of responding to it without the stress that would lead to an accident.

The buffering capacity should be adequate that any disturbance directed to it, can be absorbed without breaking down in performance or the system structure because it can adapt to it (Hoffman et al, 2017).

Also, the system's tolerance is the key to maintaining a balance between resilience and stability, how it behaves near a performance boundary, whether it degrades as pressure increases or collapses immediately when pressure is applied should be more tolerant to the systems adaptive capacity.

References

Dumitru, I. M., & Boscoianu, M. (2015). Human factors contribution to aviation safety. International Scientific Committee, 49.

http://www.afahc.ro/afases/volum_afases_2015_I.pdf#page=51Hoffman, R. R., & Hancock, P. A. (2017). Measuring resilience. Human factors, 59(4), 564-581.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0018720816686248Shayler, D. J., & Burgess, C. (2017). Before this decade is out. In The Last of NASA's Original Pilot Astronauts (pp. 179-210). Springer, Cham.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-51014-9_6Wise, J. A., Hopkin, V. D., & Garland, D. J. (2016). Handbook of aviation human factors. CRC Press.

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9780429164019