Effects of crew resource management skills of pilots on commercial aircraft accidents

Technological advancements manifested in aviation such as new types of aeroplanes, new equipment, and new navigation systems. In the light of this progress, as the technology reaches excellence, it has made sure that the human-machine interaction is inevitable, hence the human error became more apparent. In order to understand human psychology and limitations behind these errors and to mitigate them; science of psychology and human factors research conducted many researches and come up with the need for usage of crew resource management and improved it up to this date. Crew resource management is a system that provides individuals the tools to manage their social, cognitive and physiological capabilities in order to perform as a crew at high levels of performance. This system aims to make sure that the cabin, cockpit, ground personnel and air traffic controllers are working in harmony in order to establish a safe flight environment. In this thesis, a hybrid methodologyhas been used by measuring the pilots' perspective on crew resource management through the collected data with a questionnarie, and evaluation of the pilot's crew resource management abilities' effects on flight safety by conducting extensive investigation on aircraft accidents. In the first chapter of this thesis, the crew resource management has been defined, its historical evolution has been pointed and crew process in aviation has been detailed. Second part of the thesis is consists of the individual crew resource management components. Third chapter does focus on the crew resource management training, its types and the systems for evaluating pilots through their crew resource management skills. Fourth section has been written in order to clarify the relationship between the airplane accidents and pilots' crew resource management skills and accidents' distribution by category and years. Then again, in this chapter, by using threat and error management model which is also one of the core components of crew resource management, an investigation has been made on aeroplane crashes. In the final chapter, an analysis was made for measuring the perspective of pilots' on crew resource management trainings with the collected data.