FATIGUE AND HUMAN FACTOR IN AVIATION

The safety of civil aviation is the major objective of the International Civil Aviation Organization ICAO. It has long been known that the majority of aviation accidents and incidents result from less than optimum human performance, indicating that any advance in this field can be expected to have a significant impact on the improvement of aviation safety. Considerable progress has been made in increasing safety during years, but additional improvements are needed and can be achieved. One of the factors most responsible for the decline of human performance over time is fatigue, a common enemy for all shift workers. Human beings inevitably get fatigued, and when this happens attention drops and the probability of making a mistake increases; especially in the aviation field a single, trivial error can have a very high cost in term of human lives. Decisions are the pilot's domain who, together with the flight crew, is responsible for carrying out the mission and managing workload. The following document aims to analyse this complex phenomenon, identify causes/ consequences and finally propose countermeasures. However, the first line of action remains in the hands of the airlines that must always guarantee a safe service while remaining productive: an excellent tool to ensure the safety and feasibility of flights could be an analysis of risk factors related to flight task that highlights the risky weak points of the chain. After that, possible mitigation could be taken in order not to cancel the flight. In the concluding parts of the paper, a new method is proposed for numerically evaluating the effect that internal and external factors have on human performance through the definition of a safety margin.