Human Factors and Cockpit Design

A discussion on the history of human factors and how they have affected cockpit design.

In the 1930s, instrument panels equipped with a wider array of more complex instruments began to allow pilots to fly at night and in poor visibility. Further progress was made in the 1950s when instruments were introduced to enable aircraft to land in poor weather conditions. This trend has continued, with vast improvements in avionics providing increased functionality and autonomy with respect to the external environment (Cockpit History, n.d.).

Until the 1970s, the walls of civil airliner cockpits – in fact, every surface that was within the pilots’ reach – were studded with indicators, instruments, and electromechanical controls. The controls, with their arrays of complicated dials, were generally designed for a three-man crew: two pilots and an engineer. A typical transport aircraft from this period had more than 100 instruments and controls, the most important of which were packed with bars, needles, and symbols. All of these displays jostled for space on the various instrument panels and competed for the pilot’s attention. Research aimed at finding a solution to this problem, conducted in particular by NASA in the United States, led to the development of display devices capable of processing flight data, and the raw information provided by aircraft systems, and integrating it into an easily understandable synthetic image (Cockpit History, n.d.).

The problem that arose within cockpits, more specifically within the Boeing 737 MAX aircraft cockpit, was advanced technology that pilots were not trained for. “The 737 Max is a legacy of its past, built on decades-old systems, many that date back to the original version. The strategy, to keep updating the plane rather than starting from scratch, offered competitive advantages. Pilots were comfortable flying it, while airlines didn’t have to invest in costly new training for their pilots and mechanics. For Boeing, it was also faster and cheaper to redesign and recertify than starting anew” (Nicas, J., & Creswell, J., 2019).

According to The New York Times (2019), this strategy left the company in crisis, following two deadly crashes in less than five months, in 2019. The Max stretched the 737 design, creating a patchwork plane that left pilots without some safety features that could be important in a crisis — ones that have been offered for years on other planes. It is the only modern Boeing jet without an electronic alert system that explains what is malfunctioning and how to resolve it. Instead, pilots have to check a manual (Nicas, J., & Creswell, J., 2019). These crashes were not only an issue of instruments but an issue of human factors as well. Some examples of human factors are stress, fatigue, external pressures, distractions, illnesses, medication interference, and personal abilities/limitations. The human factor aspect of the Boeing 737 MAX crashes were personal abilities/limitations of the pilots. As stated before, part of Boeing’s strategy for the 737 MAX was to develop the original systems rather than implicate new systems all for the purpose of saving money. The problem here was that there were safety features missing and pilots of the aircraft could not solve the problems efficiently enough. So what Boeing thought to be an improvement, ended up as a setback that made things more complicated for pilots.

If the Boeing 737 MAX issues were to be analyzed with the “Swiss Cheese Model'', the first failure would be in the fact that Boeing made it more unsafe for pilots to handle an emergency by unnecessarily modifying the aircraft to begin with. This also goes hand in hand with the second failure which is the precondition of the aircraft: missing emergency components. The organizational influences and unsafe supervision just add to the risk that was posed by Boeing to the pilots of these planes. Boeing will pay more than $2.5 billion to settle a criminal charge related to the two 737 Max plane crashes in 2018 and 2019 that killed 346 people.

The Justice Department has announced that it has reached a deferred prosecution agreement with Boeing to resolve a charge of criminal conspiracy to defraud the FAA. Boeing admits to criminal misconduct for misleading regulators about the safety of the troubled jetliner, but the airplane manufacturer is not pleading guilty to the charge (Schaper, 2021). The two major issues were the missing emergency systems and the pilots who were not able to detect possible emergencies due to the missing emergency systems. It took two Boeing 737 MAXs crashing for change to finally be made. A few years ago, all types of this plane were grounded until repairs were made and the systems were updated.

This is significant because these problems could have been prevented if proper systems were installed. I believe that the future of cockpits will only continue to become more digitized. As technology only continues to advance, high-speed systems will most likely be integrated to detect any possible malfunctions in an aircraft the second it is present. In the future, cockpits will become more and more comfortable and screens will display most gauges. References

Cockpit History. Thales Group. (n.d.). https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/global/activities/aerospace/flight-deck-avionics- equipment-functions/flight-deck/learn-more-about. Nicas, J., & Creswell, J. (2019, April 8). Boeing's 737 MAX: 1960s design, 1990s computing power and paper manuals. The New York Times.https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/08/business/boeing-737-max- .html. Schaper, D. (2021, January 8). Boeing to pay $2.5 billion settlement over deadly 737 Max crashes. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2021/01/08/954782512/boeing-to-pay-2-5-billion-settlement- over-deadly-737-max-crashes.