Human error in Aviation

Flight safety has never been better. Human errors are recognized to be the primary or secondary cause of most of the residual accidents/incidents. The increased safety effort is primarily targeted in this area. The idea is simple: we should reduce human error contributing to incidents/accidents, but the following of the paper shows that the achievement is much harder. The paper is divided into four sections. The first section debates on the definition of human error, which still is a source of ambiguities. The present Aviation regulations relative to errors are then presented. The second section emphasizes new findings relative to the positive role of human error in the control of complex systems. The concept of ecological safety is introduced. The third section describes the (complex) relationship between errors and accidents and the systemic and organisational safety approach to large socio-technical systems. The fourth and last section gives new directions beneficial to Aviation safety. It is advocated that Aviation safety has to suppress accident, not necessarily errors. The regulations should recommend to incorporate error causation analysis during design, and should ask to focus the analysis only on undetected human errors (or late detected human errors) during certification.