13 ms·

I thought a lot of safety thinking was built around acknowledging that humans don't do everything perfectly all the time.

• ddulaney 4y ago
  It does, and one class of mitigation is to improve automation, which airlines (and their regulators) do all the time. But another class of mitigations is to make the human less error-prone in the first place. This is especially important in preventing failures that were caused by improper management of the automation. Hence the emphasis on rest periods, training, and other mitigations on the human side. In the "swiss cheese" model, a disaster needs to slip through both the human's defenses and the automation's defenses to actually happen. It makes sense to improve both of those layers of defense against disaster, while acknowledging that humans will never be perfect. But at least they can be awake and knowledgable.