A data driven approach to the development of a taxonomy for single pilot resource management in general aviation

BACKGROUND : The topic of crew resource management has been of interest to commercial and military aviation for at least two decades. Recently, general aviation (GA) researchers have begun to consider the issue of single pilot resource management (SRM). The goal of this study was to use a data driven approach, based on GA accidents, to identify an SRM taxonomy-- to define the notion of SRM. METHODS : The data used were 1,691 National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB) GA accident reports that had been previously classified as CRM failures. First, six subject matter experts (SMEs) independently sorted the accidents into categories. Following this sort, a focus group composed of the same SMEs generated the following labels/titles for the categories: Aeronautical Decision-Making (ADM), Communication (COMM), Monitoring (MON), and Preflight Planning (PFP). Next, five new SMEs independently sorted the same 1,692 accidents under the new labels. All accidents without at least 80% agreement were pulled and reclassified by the consensus of two SMEs. All data was then compiled. RESULTS : PFP failures was the most common precursor in all of the accidents (1072 our of 1692, 63.4%), followed by ADM (96 our of 1692, 19.7%), MON (71 out of 1692, 13.9%), and finally COMM (8 out of 1692, 2.8%). For fatal accidents, MON (71 out of 235, 30.2%) had the most, followed by ADM (96 out of 334, 28.7%), Comm (8 out of 51, 15.7%) and PFP (168 out of 1070, 15.7%). CONCLUSION : This study examined the single pilot, general aviation accidents related to SRM. The categories of failures were aeronautical decision-making, communication, monitoring, and preflight planning. These categories can be considered subdimensions of SRM.Thus, the result of this study is a preliminary taxonomy for SRM. This taxonomy can be used to further address the concept of SRM and SRM failures.