The two major accidents that precipitated the formal concept of CRM were Eastern 401 in the Everglades, and United 173 in Portland. While the buzzword CRM is relatively new, early ‘80s, the concept has been in use since people have been flying together. A really good example of CRM occurs in the film 2001 A Space Odyssey. In the particular scene, HAL explains to Dave that the AE-35 unit will go 100% failure in 72 hours. Dave’s response is ‘okay, I suppose we’ll have to bring it in, but first I want to go over this with Frank (the other crewmember) and mission control.’ They then bring in the unit to trouble shoot, and discuss the problems with HAL. That is CRM, involving the other crewmember(s) to solve a problem. Oh, and the film was introduced in ’68 (I think), long before either aircraft accident. Some old timer told me, ‘if it’s new it’s probably not very good, and if it’s good, it’s probably not new.’ (Take that with a grain of salt, but you see the correlation.)
The problem with CRM is that the people that really get into it and think, oh wow this is great, generally aren’t the people that need CRM. The people who think it’s just a bunch of psycho-babble are generally the people that need it. But how do you make a horse, that doesn’t think it is thirsty, drink?
As far as a definition of CRM, Tinyrice’s is as good as any I’ve seen.