Managing High-Risk Environments:
Robert Helmreich
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HUMAN FACTORS: From the Cockpit to the Operating Room
University of Texas psychology professor Robert Helmreich gets around: Bangkok, Rio, Buenos Aires, Addis Ababa, Amsterdam, Jedda, and more. In recent years he's presented United Nations-sponsored seminars on "Human Factors and Flight Safety" before audiences as geographically widespread and culturally diverse as the cities themselves. Helmreich is a world-recognized aviation safety authority with a mission: to make air travel safer by improving training that addresses the team management aspects of flight. It's a longstanding commitment rooted in personal experience. During the early '60s he served four years as a sea-going Naval officer in the Pacific, Atlantic, and Mideast, and he became interested in human behavior under real-life stress situations, a background that would inform his future academic work. After leaving the service he earned a doctorate from Yale in personality and social psychology. He developed early research specialties in aviation and manned space exploration because they were paradigms for the demanding group situation, with elements of high risk.
Supported by NASA, the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Federal Aviation Administration, Helmreich has applied his expertise to issues of human performance, with primary attention, during the last decade, to behavior in the cockpit. Investigations have shown that more than two-thirds of all air crashes involve pilot error: not in the sense of technical incompetence but rather through a lack of intra-crew communication and coordination, often induced by flaws in organizational practices.
Helmreich's team studies accidents, the use of teamwork in normal and demanding operations, and the organizational context that surrounds flight operations. Over the past 10 years he has worked with crews from airlines based on every continent except Antarctica (including most major U.S. carriers) to establish an extensive database of information about crew performances in operational settings. His group's research has placed significant emphasis on the social and organizational determinants that influence performance and safety. In 1987 he and his colleagues produced a model of, and a methodology for assessing, team performance in the aviation environment. Their research led them to help develop a highly successful training program called CRM (Crew Resource Management) that is teaching pilots, cockpit crews, flight attendants, and traffic controllers to work as a team to reduce errors. The FAA has now made CRM mandatory training for flight crews at all major and regional airlines. In 1994 Robert Helmreich received Aviation Week and Space Technology's Distinguished Contribution to Aviation Safety Award for his research contributions to aviation safety. He received the 1997 David S. Sheridan Award for distinguished service to mankind in the fields of science, medicine and teaching Management. In 1999 he was invited to present the findings of his research to the Royal Aeronautics Society in London. He has held the post of visiting professor at four universities. As aviation becomes a global endeavor, multi-national crews and cross-cultural interactions--both inside the cockpit and between cockpit and ground--are becoming widespread. Helmreich's current research focuses on differing cultural styles that affect aviation, and on the ways they mesh or clash. He has made the observation that each society possesses attributes that profoundly influence the behavior of its pilots. In the cockpit's cramped atmosphere, culturally driven attitudes toward authority and technology take on enormous significance and the disparate expectations, language barriers, and humor idiosyncrasies of a mixed crew can create harmful tensions. His team has developed a new model of threat and error in aviation that is being used in accident investigation and in training pilots to recognize and manage risks and errors in flight operations. In this project, a team of expert observers use a detailed coding system to record threats and errors as well as countermeasures employed by crews. The observers also detail how errors are made, who detects the error, and how it is managed. The data shows how much error exists in the system (an average of two per flight were observed) and how effectively they are managed using CRM. Also of interest was the fact that the greatest source of error was in dealing with automated systems--the very things that were designed to reduce error. Helmreich's work is supported by group of highly talented students and staff. Over the years, he has trained a succession of remarkable doctoral students whose names resonate within the industry today:
The list will no doubt continue to grow. To ensure support of graduate students working on the project, Helmreich has established the Ralph and Caroline Helmreich Endowed Presidential Fellowship at The University of Texas at Austin. The fellowship supports doctoral students working in the area of team performance and human factors. Helmreich is quick to embrace innovative applications of his groundbreaking research. When physicians at a Swiss university sought help in adapting his approach to the operating room, he accepted the challenge, and after three years of productive collaboration, carried the results back to U.S. soil. Since then, he's lectured widely to medical audiences throughout North America on the need for improved teamwork among hospital professionals involved in critical care. In spring 1999 the project began to collaborate with several hospitals and medical schools, including the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. But his approach has unlimited potential and does not stop in the cockpit or at the emergency room door. His prescriptions for the cockpit are already being modified for the ship's bridge, and it's possible to envision future adoption in other high risk settings, such as the nuclear and petrochemical industries, where swift, accurate communication and coordinated action among key personnel are crucial. Rae Nadler-Olenick,
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