Applying lessons from commercial aviation safety and operations to resuscitation.

What Should Aviation Safety Incidents Teach Us?

Accidents and incidents involving safety-critical software systems often provide lessons to the systems’ users and designers, to industry, and to the software engineering community at large. Proper identification and documentation of these lessons is critical in order to prevent the recurrence of an untoward event. In this paper we examine two commercial aviation incidents involving failures of...

Human factors in anaesthesia: lessons from aviation.

Aviation safety has evolved over more than a century and has achieved remarkable results. Applying some of the lessons learned may help make healthcare safer. From the perspective of an anaesthetic background and some thousands of hours of airline flying, I offer a personal perspective, try to give a sense of the place of human factors in airline operations and some of the current problems, and...

Learning to fly: lessons for the resuscitation community from the aviation industry.

Considerations Toward Defining Medical “Levels of Care” for Commercial Spaceflight

While all modes of human transportation introduce some degree of risk to life and health, the rigors of spaceflight present particularly challenging physiological and environmental factors that occur under very unforgiving operational circumstances. Commercial spaceflight will face issues similar to those experienced on prior traditional space missions, as well as encounter other health concern...

Quantifying Risk in Commercial Aviation with Fault Trees and Event Sequence Diagrams

The mission of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is to provide the safest and most efficient aerospace system in the world. As the FAA plans and develops the Next Generation (NextGen) Air Transportation System, quantitative risk assessments can help evaluate the impacts of new technologies and changed procedures. The FAA needs to ensure that NextGen changes that could potentially increa...