Human Factors Taxonomy Workshop & Tour of RAF Odiham
29 November 2017
Cohort 3 researhc Robin Hamer attended a one day event in partnership with the RAF’s human factors practitioners and the CIEHF. The event was very well run and was tailored more towards the aviation industry with a specific focus on military applications. Since RAF Odiham is the country base of the Chinook fleet, we were given a unique opportunity to have a tour of the Chinooks, the maintenance area and of the training simulator. It was good to see how proactive the RAF are with human factors and how they are continuously look to improve their human factors practises.
The most useful part of the day consisted of the workshop whereby human factors specialists from RSSB came and presented their human factors taxonomy to attendees. This taxonomy was a way to identify contributory factors to accidents in an in-depth manner. We used this taxonomy on three case studies from the aviation industry and it proved very useful to find what goes wrong in organisational accidents, but what also goes right. It was also very good of RSSB to show everyone how to use this taxonomy properly. I can see this being very useful in my PhD as a starting point and I can already see how it can be developed for the nuclear industry. Although the taxonomy wasn’t perfect, it was a good starting point, so I am glad I managed to get my hands on it.
All in all, the event was a success. I managed to obtain the documents I wanted too and managed to network with other human factors specialists not in my domain.
