PJ2, re “The areas which remain the largest single factor in accidents is the human factor and it is in these areas that "academics" can contribute best.”
Our opinions appear to diverge at this point.
Human involvement is the largest factor in accidents, but I am not convinced that academics can provide the best contributions for improving safety.
There are and will be notable exceptions, but in very general terms even where the academics identify critical areas affecting safety they fail to deliver practical solutions, e.g. Helmreich defined CRM as “the application of human factors’, but he has not provided a good workface application / implementation of CRM (or is TEM/LOSA another attempt).
The dependence on academics is perpetuated by the regulators; IMHO there are very few ‘HF’ experienced pilots in administration and the regulator/researchers, although domain focussed are often years behind industry’s needs. Even when using basic academic research, only that which is proven is used, thus it may be quite old or based on dated operational information in a rapidly changing world.
The problem is two fold, first the regulators believe that they can regulate safety with ‘laws’, and secondly, that they can apply the academic output directly. Whereas safety (the maintenance of the good safety record) actually requires a good working partnership with industry (combined safety culture) involving a two way dialogue about problems and solutions, and wide ranging guidance materials to aid implementation of the regulations. Again there are exceptions.
Some of the better training / safety applications originate from the pilot-academics (not necessarily academic-pilots), but the most effective people are experience pilots who can ‘translate’ applicable research and provide practical applications. These and similar people with knowledge and experience in the industry are able to identify the most important safety issues. Although these issues may be identified by the academics they often remain hidden in theoretical general principles or as unproven hypotheses. Then there are many subjects where the academics do not agree, e.g. decision making is a critical safety area in aviation, yet only recently has industry is been appraised of ‘Naturalistic Decision Making’ which represents what actually happens in operational situations. Not all academics agree with the mainstream NDM theories, but from those who do, the descriptions of their work is best translated as ‘aspects of airmanship’, so the academics now tell us that we need to teach airmanship.
I am sure that there are similar examples from TEM and LOSA – new found safety initiatives, that when deciphered from academic/regulatory language matches what many experienced pilots have been doing for years. The problem then is that of educating – training, time, and money; thus these are the emerging threats to the good safety record.
As stated in previous posts the industry requires defences in depth, but which are the best defences, where do we put our scant resources, can the operators withstand any more initiatives / regulations?
Perhaps the academics could answer these questions, but even the astute James Reason did not provide guidance(how to) when he said that it is now time to ‘pick the high fruit’ (the difficult to reach targets) if safety was to be improved; unless of course he was referring to operator management or even the regulators.