CAP 737: Flight-crew Human Factors Handbook
A regulator's own handbook on flight-crew human factors, and the clearest available statement of what psychological safety looks like when it is written into operational doctrine rather than into theory. The term itself appears nowhere in 242 pages; the apparatus is described throughout. On authority gradients the handbook is explicit: accidents have been attributed to autocratic flight decks, Tenerife most notably, and reducing the gradient so that first officers would speak up was an early aim of CRM. It then does something more interesting than the usual flattening argument by naming the opposite failure, where gradient reduction went too far and produced a near laissez-faire climate with off-task conversation at critical times (Delta 1141, Dallas Fort Worth, 1988), with sterile-cockpit rules as the correction. The strongest passage for this corpus concerns silence: leaders are warned to avoid the temptation to take comfort when group members do not show concern or fail to speak up, because it is only later discovered that the follower was acting out of compliance or obedience. That is organisational silence, described as a hazard, in guidance issued to an industry. Alongside it sit instructions that a captain should emphasise their acceptance of being challenged, that leading and suggestive questions produce agreement rather than independent opinion, and an anecdote of a first officer who could not speak up even when specifically instructed to. The wider handbook carries Dekker's old and new views of error, Reason and Rasmussen on error types, threat and error management, and a just-culture distinction between error and violation. Two limits, the first stated by the document itself: the handbook asks to be read as deliberately simplified, warning that it states scientific information as fact where precision is still debated and that researchers should treat this as a limitation if quoting it. And it is guidance rather than evidence, so it shows what a regulator believes and instructs, not what has been tested. Second edition, February 2023, restructured around competency-based training and assessment; the regulatory and safety-management chapters of the 2016 first edition were removed. The leadership, teams and communication material is chapters 14 to 16.
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Neighbours (13)
- Crew Resource Mgmt
- Organizational Silence: A Barrier to Change and Development in a Pluralistic World
- Status and Cockpit Dynamics: A Review and Empirical Study
- The Criminalization of Human Error in Aviation and Healthcare: A Review
- The Evolution of Crew Resource Management Training in Commercial Aviation
- The Tenerife Disaster
- Airline Pilots' Perceptions of and Experiences in Crew Resource Management (CRM) Training
- Reducing Power Gradients
- Cultural Diversity and Crew Communication
- Flat Orgs & Hierarchy
- Leadership in Healthcare (CRM)
- Shared Leadership in Multiteam Systems: How Cockpit and Cabin Crews Lead Each Other to Safety
- PACE Assertiveness