A Case Study of Marine Accident Investigation and Analysis with Focus on Human Error

Nationally and internationally reported statistics on marine accidents show that 80% or more of all marine accidents are caused fully or in part by human error. According to the statistics of marine accident causes from Korean Maritime Safety Tribunal(KMST), operating errors are implicated in 78.7% of all marine accidents that occurred from 2002 to 2006. In the case of the collision accidents, about 95% of all collision accidents are caused by operating errors, and those human error related collision accidents are mostly caused by failure of maintaining proper lookout and breach of the regulations for preventing collision. One way of reducing the probability of occurrence of the human error related marine accidents effectively is by investigating and understanding the role of the human elements in accident causation. In this paper, causal factors/root causes classification systems for marine accident investigation were reviewed and some typical human error analysis methods used in shipping industry were described in detail. This paper also proposed a human error analysis method that contains a cognitive process model, a human error analysis technique(Maritime HFACS) and a marine accident causal chains, and then its application to the actual marine accident was provided as a case study in order to demonstrate the framework of the method.