Aviation experts have identified poor communication between cockpit and the control tower, loss of situational awareness, lack of training, poor facilities, fatigue, flight crew judgment and maintenance personnel as some of the human factor errors that need to be addressed to lessen the incidence of accidents and incidents in the industry.
They made the submission at the conference on ‘Prevention of human factors in air accident occurrences’ organised recently in Lagos by the Accident Investigation Bureau (AIB) in partnership with League of Airport and Aviation Correspondents (LAAC).
Speaking on poor communication between the cockpit and the control tower, president of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association (NATCA), Mr. Abayomi Agoro said communication and training on new facilities are needed to improve the situation in the air space.
He stated that the airlines are not compliant with some of the new technologies while some ATC staff have not been trained on them.
“The issue of communication has been something we have been calling on government and the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA) as service provider to do more on. The poor communication is not only from the ground equipment; at times also it is from the air stations but most of the time these are some things that can degenerate into incidents or accidents.
“Even now that we have data exchange which has to do with the Controller Pilot Data Link Communications (CPDLC) not all the airlines are compliant with that and not all the controllers have gone through the training. So definitely, it is one of the areas we have to look critically into to prevent human factors we are talking about.
In his contribution, a representative of the Airline Operators of Nigeria (AON), Capt Akin George described the communication system in Nigeria as “weak.”
“The communication system in Nigeria is quite weak; this has been a recurring problem for the last 10-15 years. Solutions have been put in; we take one step forward and within a month or two we are back to the norm.
“We have been talking on human factors today and we know one of the critical elements is communication. If you cannot communicate with your controller then who is controlling who? “As of today the communication between aircraft and the services coming out of Kano to Lagos is extremely weak. If you happen to be operating from the eastern side of the country, coming out of Calabar or Uyo, Port get Harcourt and you are heading towards Kano, it is extremely weak. In most cases you have to get another aircraft to relay your information.
“Now whilst all this is going on the aircraft does not stay in one place and so you have a dynamic situation which for me, remains high risk and that is one of the areas we need to tackle as soon as possible in order to reduce the risk,” he said.
In his remarks, the commissioner and chief executive officer of AIB said it is vital to understand the complexity of human factors within a system with the view of reducing them to a bare minimum.
“Despite of a positive development in the trend of accidents recorded since the beginning of the 21st century, the number of air accidents is still unsatisfactory.
“Consequently, it is of paramount importance to do everything that would contribute to substantial reduction of the human factor failure in air transportation.
“A system of models appears to be an important tool for overall understanding of the complexity of human factors, serving as starting-points to an analytical and classification research of the human factor.
“At the same time, these models enable qualified investigation and assessment of the causes of air accidents and incidents, thereby preventing them from repeated occurrence,” he said.
