Hazards and Risk Analysis for Helicopter Aerial Work Mission Profiles

This work is originated by the need to better investigate the human factors in the context of safety in rotorcraft aviation. In particular, the aim is to describe, along with the typical helicopter aerial work missions, the state of the art of the safety in order to outline the picture of the potential hazardous situations and the related safety standards. Great attention is paid to the perspective which allows to better understand the allocation of responsibilities within organizations, underlining the importance of organizational management in harmful occurrences. Subsequently, the objective is to provide to the reader essential information about the mission analysis methodologies, suggesting a case analysis process developed on the basis of human-factors-oriented theories and taxonomies. In particular, some milestones of the human-factors- oriented analysis theories are mentioned, such as SHELL Model, Reason’s SwissCheese Model, HFACS Taxonomy and more. The suggested case analysis process is then tested on a case study, related to an actual helicopter accident, in order to experience the activity to read and interpret an accident technical report, to carry out a factual analysis from a human factors perspective, and performing a ’risk assessment’ analysis through the aforementioned analysis models SHELL and HFACS. The real goal of such activity aims to obtain a clear reconstruction of the events and allocation of responsibilities, in order to file some useful safety recommendations as a suggestion to make the safety standards even higher than they today are. In conclusion, the involvement of the human factors in safety critical aviation software is addressed giving a better idea of the multiple sides of this matter. The writing of functional requirements and use cases, the human-machine interface guidelines and more are also discussed. Finally, the research face up with the possibility of implementing the aforementioned case analysis process in a software which can act as a ’RiskAssessor’, with the aim to create a tool that can to some extent replace or help humans in the helicopter aerial work mission assessment, making GO/NO GO decisions once the mission scenario has been outlined by the user.