NEWS RELEASE
10 October 2001
New research centre aims
for super safety in the air
UniSA’s Systems
Engineering and Evaluation Centre has won $250,000 over two years from
the Sir Ross & Sir Keith Smith Fund to seed the development of a new
research concentration to enhance air safety.
The Centre of Expertise in Aviation
Systems Safety or CEASS will bring together the disciplines of Systems
Engineering, Mathematics and Psychology to move aviation systems forward
from their already very high level of safety to a new “super” level.
Under normal circumstances flying
in a jet airliner is still the safest form of travel available.
According to Senior Research Fellow
from UniSA’s Systems Engineering and Evaluation Centre, David
Harris, the rate of fatal accidents per flying hour has shown a steady
decrease from the inception of aviation until around the 1980s but since
then the improvement has levelled out and has been almost constant for
around two decades.
“Industry forecasts show that the
volume of air traffic will continue to increase and this implies that the number
of fatal accidents will also increase which has driven the desire to lower
the accident rate by an order of magnitude,” Harris said.
He said much of the international
research world has looked at what must be done to achieve a decrease in
accident rate.
“What we have found is that a
number of factors have contributed to slowing down the progress in this
area,” he said.
“Accidents are already rare
events so you would have to fly non-stop for well over a century to be
likely to experience an accident that caused the loss of life.
“Although accident investigations
normally find a cause, or a chain of causes, for each accident, accidents
are now so rare that each tends to be unique and there are few common
factors. So there is often
little that can be learned directly to prevent recurrences.
“Most accidents involve some
pilot error. While the
creativity, skill and resourcefulness that pilots bring to their task is
essential in recovering from potentially dangerous situations, pilots are
human, and their reliability is set by the slow time-scale of human
evolution. We cannot find
pilots who do not, occasionally, make errors.
“To achieve current safety
levels, the reliability of the sub-systems making up the aircraft is now
so high that their mean time between failure (the time they can be
expected to keep working) is now in the thousands of years.
There are no test programs can run long enough to validate their
reliability.”
In fact, while aviation safety
showed continuous improvement from the days of the Wright Brothers to the
1980s, largely through engineering improvements, Harris says it has now
remained static for over 20 years.
“We are now up against a set of
fundamental constraints in engineering and human behaviour and moving
forward requires a whole new approach,” he said.
“The issues that affect air
transport safety cross the disciplines of engineering, psychology and the
mathematics of probability.
“They involve the way people work
together and the way they relate to the systems they work with and
bringing them together to find solutions requires a systems approach.”
He said UniSA’s Systems
Engineering and Evaluation Centre provided a fertile environment for these
new approaches to be developed.
“By working in a
multidisciplinary framework the Centre expects to create the insight
needed to make progress on this important topic moving air travel from
safe, to super safe,” Harris said.
The project will be headed by the
Director of SEEC, Prof
Stephen Cook. In
addition, specialist expertise will be provided from the School of
Mathematics (A/Prof
Bruce Brown), from the School of Psychology (Prof
Russell Hawkins) and from the University’s Flying School (Capt
Albert Fyfe).
More
information: David Harris (08) 8302 3351 or 041 0597769 or Professor
Stephen Cook (08) 83023818
Media
contact: Michèle Nardelli (08) 8302 0966 or 041 8823673
email: michele.nardelli@unisa.edu.au
