The British Airways human factors reporting programme

This paper describes three safety programmes that provide BA flight operations with feedback on operational quality. Two of these are flight data recording and air safety reporting. These earlier programmes are described primarily to set in context the development of the most recent of the three, the human factors reporting programme (HFR). This is a confidential programme that records and analyses data using a distinctly different process from most reporting programmes. It requests not only information about ‘What’ happened in an event but ‘Why’ the event occurred and ‘How’ the crew dealt with the problem. Analysis uses ‘factors’ describing crew actions and the influences on crew actions. Actions and influences can describe safety positive as well as negative events and the analysis produces causal event sequence diagrams of each reported event. The paper describes these processes and offers some illustrative examples taken from the database.