GENESIS OF CRM


With few exceptions, today’s crews are much different than they were thirty years ago. The captain of the aircraft was once considered “God like”, and his decisions were always the “right” ones. There was little, if any, input from the other pilots because they assumed the captain knew what he was doing. Obviously, times have changed, and now communication and decision making is encouraged to be a team effort—this is a key component to strong CRM.


In the old days, a flight attendant would often hesitate to bring up a safety issue; this type of contribution, to question the decisions of a superior, would often be considered disrespectful. Part of this paradigm comes from the military. As one of the largest contributors to the pilot community, the military, along with military training, fosters an environment of unquestioned hierarchy. This mind set does not transfer well into civilian cockpits that display healthy CRM.


CRM related issues began to manifest in pilot error related airline accidents that claimed hundreds of lives. In the 1970’s a series of aviation accidents occurred, which were attributed to pilot error. The aviation industry acknowledged the need for a new type of training for pilots, which includes psychological factors related to communication and interaction on flight decks.


Four of the main instigating accidents that highlight the need for CRM are: • Eastern Airlines Flight 401, which crashed in the Everglades, FL • KLM Flight 4805/Pan Am runway accident in Tenerife, the Canary Islands • United Airlines Flight 173, Portland, OR and • Air Ontario’s icing crash in Dryden, Ontario


These four accidents all contained components in which a lack of teamwork and intergroup communication had been identified as contributors to a negative outcome. Each accident has been used by the aviation industry and researchers to advocate for a new type of training. CRM Training.


There is a common tendency to think of CRM as training only for captains. This notion misses the essence of the CRM training mission: the prevention of crew-related accidents. CRM training works best in the context of the entire crew. Training exercises are most effective if all crewmembers work together and learn together. In the past much of the flightcrew training has been segmented by crew position. This segmentation has been effective for meeting certain training needs, such as seat-dependent technical training and upgrade training, but segmentation is not appropriate for most CRM training, and FACTS supports this notion.


CRM 2, TEM, Fatigue 4


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