Deriving Targeted Interventions for Ground Damage

Ground damage is economically important to airlines, but it also represents a source of well-investigated human errors. This study of maintenance-related ground damage incidents at one airline showed a small number of consistent patterns of both the final ground damage events and the latent failures which contribute to these events. This analysis led directly to specific interventions which can be targeted at specific types of ground damage incidents. Beyond ground damage, the technique can be used to focus human factors interventions on other manifestations of error, such as operational incidents.