Human factor has started become popular as the commercial aviation industry has realized that human error, rather than mechanical failure. Human factor has a crucial role in aviation. Aircraft accidents that happened could be explained by Swiss cheese model of system accident how it happened. Aircraft accidents such as China Airline Flight 642, Singapore Airline Fight 006 and American Airline Flight 006 all these three accidents have similar attributes that is human factors such as lack of experience, not prepared and poor decisions involve which cause the accident. Machines do not make mistakes only human makes mistake.
Human factors stand in aviation with a crucial role. Swiss cheese model of system accident has a positive effect on aviation safety and investigation. It’s a set of shields with loop holes with them. The holes are when people makes poor decisions eight shield each has holes on them. An accident or incident occurs where ‘holes’ in these layers align. The holes themselves change over time. The shields consist of safety culture, standard operating procedures, meticulous mechanical attention, redundant system, pilot knowledge and preparation, pilot judgement, pilot skill and luck. For instance if there is a typhoon where the airport that the plane is going to land the pilot has to consider the safety of the passengers and will the plane be able to land safely if not then divert to somewhere else, however the pilot decide to continue to descent the pilots must be able to take care of all kinds of situation if the pilots has no skill, poor judgements and without any luck this is when the accidents happen. Reason (1990) stated that “systems accidents have their primary origins in the fallible decisions made by designers and high-level (corporate or plant) managerial decision makers”. This suggests that accidents happened because of the fallible decisions that high level of managerial decision makers for example pilots. As Robson (2008) has stated “There’s no such thing as an aircraft accident; only a human accident” only people makes mistake that cause accidents not aircraft cause accident.
On 22 August 1999 China Airline Flight 642 crashed at Hong Kong International Airport. 315 people were on board 312 people survived and three were killed. After the investigation it was mostly pilot error, he was unable to arrest the high rate of descent existing at 50 ft altitude on the radar altimeter. The descent rate at touch down was 18-20ft per second. Also the weather conditions were severe the flight crew had prepare to divert the flight to Taipei if the situation at Hong Kong was unsuitable to land. Extra fuel was prepared for this situation. The weather and wind check had passed therefore they believe they could land at Hong Kong. Some of the earlier flight had diverted. During landing the plane descended along the glideslide until 700 ft. They disengaged the autopilot but left the autothrottle on. Since the rate of descent was not arrested, the plane landed with the right wing slightly lower therefore the right landing gear touched down first which causes the right engine impact on the runway and the right wing was detach from the fuselage. Since the left wing was still attached, the lift from the wing rolled the fuselage onto its right. The plane came to stop and inverted on the grass next to the runway. Murphy (2011). This indicate that China Airline needs more training with their crew the previous flight had diverted but China Airline’s crew did not divert not because they did not carried enough fuel because they believe they could handle the severe weather at Hong Kong the self-confident of the crew was too high also the pilot lack of experience to divert the flight to Taipei. All these result the aircraft accident this suggest China Airline should give their crews more training enable to face the severe weather situation like that.
On 31 October 2000 Singapore Airline Flight 006 was scheduled flight from
