A Preliminary Human Factors Analysis of Naval Aviation Maintenance Related Mishaps

Naval Aviation has expanded its efforts to eliminate mishaps; especially those linked to human error. This focus was expanded to cover not only aircrew error, but maintainer error as well. To examine maintenance error, the Naval Safety Center's Human Factors Accident Classification System (HFACS) was adapted to analyze eight fiscal years of major maintenance mishaps. The HFACS Maintenance Extension effectively profiled the nature of maintenance errors and depicted the latent supervisory and maintainer conditions that “set the stage” for subsequent unsafe maintainer acts.