Communications: The Inside Track in Resource Management

Fundamental to the conjunction of safety and efficiency, sustained man-machine and man-man information transfer or communications in the large play an ever increasing role in today's crew-aircraft-environment aviation system. The coming of more automation and new cockpit information technology can bring crewmembers to be lured away from appropriate communications with their aircraft or amongst themselves. The common challenge to airlines and aircraft manufacturers is to monitor and control this communication issue, the former by enforcing high quality communications, the latter by designing high quality communications. The growing recognition throughout the industry of the need for appropriate- cockpit resource management has brought AIRBUS INDUSTRIE to analyse videotaped flights of the three crews that participated in the A 300 FF minimum crew certification flight campaign. Coupled with statistical techniques this allowed to differentiate crew resource management styles through their functional and behavioral task-communicative patterns. Although this approach contends that varying styles of management can cope with the flight task, it would seem that the most performing ones are likely to be those where clear communications prevail with clear delineations of roles and responsibilities and distinct patterns of task and time allocations.