A feasibility study of the use of incidents and accidents reports to evaluate effects of Team Resource Management in Air Traffic Control

Valuable improvements in performance have been obtained by 'Crew Resource M anagement' (CRM) courses performed in the domain of aviation related to the crew in a cockpit, and in the maritime domain related to the crew on the b ridge of large ships. CRM courses are currently being adapted to the domain of Air Traffic Control under the heading of 'Team Resource Management'. In this adaptation phase, it is important to obtain knowledge concerning the effectiveness of such training programmes in relation to enhancing human fa ctors awareness and knowledge. This requires a methodology for detecting tr aining effects. For this purpose a feasibility study has been conducted con cerning the use of paper cases - short written reports on real or fictitiou s incidents or accidents - to discriminate air traffic controllers with reg ard to their ability to identify 'human factors' determinants involved in s uch cases. The outcome of the feasibility study did not show clearly signif icant discrimination between the selected groups of air traffic controllers , but vague signs indicate that the use of more complex discriminators migh t be worthwhile to explore. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reser ved.