Many failures of interpersonal communication and coordination in the aircraft cockpit have been found to occur as a result of poor management of flightdeck 'resources'. Crew Resource Management (CRM) is a concept that has evolved within the aviation community to specifically address this issue of resource management. The concept of CRM has necessitated a paradigm shift from individual pilot issues to crew behavior or group-level issues. Despite a decade of research, CRM remains a poorly defined concept. Ongoing research in the field of CRM has led to the development of a few models of CRM and group performance, but although these models provide valuable insight into the issues involved, they fail to present a much needed, coherent theory of crew performance. I believe that the application of the principles of systems engineering can lead to a better definition of the terms and concepts involved in CRM, thereby leading to its better understanding. Using the principles of Structured Analysis and Design Technique (SADT) and IDEF0, I developed a model of crew performance. By treating the crew as a system, performance was analyzed from a CRM perspective, resulting in a functional model of crew performance which acts as a framework for understanding and integrating the various terms and concepts involved in CRM, such as mental models and situation awareness. The model was then applied towards analyzing two aircraft accidents representative of "good" and "bad" CRM. The model is potentially useful in developing objective measures of crew performance so as to enable the establishment of CRM standards for evaluation. A comprehensive representation of crew performance, it can be applied to analyzing aircraft accidents and incidents. It is also potentially useful as an instructional aid in the development of training programs for CRM instructors and check airmen, and in the design of flightdecks. / Graduation date: 1995

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Thesis (M.S. in Computer Science)--Naval Postgraduate School, June 2003. / Thesis advisor(s): Cynthia Irvine, Timothy Levin. Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-92). Also available online.

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Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 97-100).

The paper presents a partial ethnography from the work setting of commercial jet aircraft. Data was collected through participant observation in the work role of stewardess, mostly on prestige overseas flights. The flight is therefore the unit of study and has been treated as a social occasion for sociological analysis. Post flight diaries were written up, additional data came from other airline sources, i.e. manuals of procedures, etc. The perspective is directed from the cabin crew as a performance team. The analysis is based on the everyday activities routinely performed as orderly events commonsensically produced by the persons located in the setting. The everyday work day's distinctive features i.e. crew impermanency, flight time and space pressures, excessively long on-duty periods, temporal marginality of duty periods, and stress norms, are described as a base from which to discuss team performances. The requirement to set up work units very quickly, crew impermanence and team performances are positively correlated to the need for members to know something about each other. Status dimensions and job specific preferred characteristics are therefore a relevant part of each person's floating biography which is occupationally positively functional as a base from which coworker selection is made. A setting orientation to ethnicity is an outcome of the presence of representatives from many cultural groups in the passenger population. Competency in the enactment of everyday activities is problematic and communication/interaction difficulties arise as a result. The lack of organizational structures to provide relevant kinds of information on passenger populations (relevant as defined by the members of the cabin crew) necessitates that they form cognitive visual maps of the setting and participants. It is suggested that this is typical to other occupations and settings. Other demographically related problems are discussed. Space and flight time pressures as related to territoriality, conflict behaviour and coercive practices used by the crew to maintain the social order are analyzed in terms of regions. An outcome of a lack of physical barriers is the socially constructed barriers of access to regions. Standardized patterns of work organization and social relationships are used to effect their fluctuating definitions. (They are mapped for visual reference.) Processes of personalization of participants is presented; contrastively, impersonalized service relationships are perceived to be an organizational work requirement, and are socially created by distinctive communication patterns for the purposes of getting the job done prior landing. Lastly, a flight is analyzed as a 'safe but dangerous' fateful event, organizationally constructed, and dramatized by the cabin crew. Ritual observance of passage of the take-off and landing stages of the occasion are imposed on all participants. Two products of safety management are the policing practices and gallows humor flight attendants are habituated to perceive as an everyday routine part of their job situation. / Arts, Faculty of / Sociology, Department of / Graduate

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / Today, there is no way to ensure that the personnel working within the cockpit of an aircraft in flight are authorized to be there. The primary goal of this thesis is to propose a hypothetical design for the use of a nonintrusive mechanism on the flight deck of an aircraft to provide continuous or periodic authentication of authorized aircraft personnel. The mechanism should answer questions such as: "Is the person who is flying the plane actually the person who they say they are?" and "Is the correct person in control of the aircraft throughout the whole flight segment?" We will investigate biometrics as a possible security mechanism. In this thesis, various biometric methods are examined and their application in the flight deck is shown. Studies that have been conducted on real biometric devices are examined and their results are reported. Also examined are the current practices and procedures that take place in the flight deck, so that the proposed designs can be understood to not interfere with current activities therein. Two biometric solutions (i.e. proposed designs) to provide continuous or periodic authentication of authorized personnel in the flight deck are introduced. The proposed designs are general and can be used with different types of biometric device(s), and can be extended to include multi-biometrics. / Naval Postgraduate School author (civilian).