*6.1.5 Air space (flight operations, pax and ferry)*

This segment covers all the activities connected with low-speed and high-speed taxy checks of aircraft, test flights for certification of aircraft, commercial operations of aircraft for transporting people and freight. It also covers rest of the air space.

#### *Role of Human Factors in Preventing Aviation Accidents: An Insight DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.106899*

These include the space populated by helicopters, other commercial aircraft, drones, trainer aircraft, cargo aircraft, flying cars, birds, and natural phenomena such as thunderstorms, lightning, heavy rains, poor visibility, and so on. It is here that the pilots and crew members play their role and interact with air traffic controller, design organization, and regulatory body.

#### *6.1.6 Airport and air traffic controller (ATC)*

This segment covers all the activities connected with management of airport operations, right from fueling the aircraft, pre-flight inspection, clearance for taxying out to the runway, clearance for flight take off, continual monitoring of hundreds of aircraft that are cruising at various flight altitudes, clearance for landings including emergency landings, etc. The ATC coordinates and interacts with the flight crew, design organization, and regulatory body as necessary in achieving its objectives.

#### *6.1.7 Regulatory body*

This is an extremely important segment and covers regulation of transport services from source to destination, enforces civil aviation regulations, air safety, and airworthiness standards. It also plays a key role in auditing of design, production, and maintenance organizations, participates in the certification process of aircraft, maintains an aircraft register, and issues certificate of registration to aircraft. It also plays a key role in accident investigation and subsequent issue of advisory circulars/ airworthiness directives as applicable to prevent future recurrence.

#### **6.2 Man and environment**

Aircraft accidents happen essentially due to a mismatch in the interaction between man and the environment. This means that there must be an issue either with the man or the environment, or a combination of both. For the purpose of discussion, environment is defined to include all such factors outside of the human system. The word "man" is not gender-specific, but is retained for generic description of personnel. The concept is shown in **Figure 9** illustrating a safe zone, two "potentially unsafe" zones and an unsafe zone. These four zones represent four possible combinations arising out of man-environment interaction. These are elucidated in the following paragraphs.

#### *6.2.1 Safe zone*

This is the target zone that every safety-conscious organization strives for and would like to remain in this zone forever. The requirement to reach and sustain in this zone requires fully fit personnel and an ideal/flawless environmental condition. Fitness of the personnel includes physical, physiological, psychological, and psychosocial factors and his interaction with the environment. Ideal environment includes adequate funding, infrastructure, resources, feasible time schedules, healthy work environment, and so on.

## *6.2.2 Potentially unsafe zone with flawed environment*

This zone represents situations wherein fully fit personnel perform their work in environments that are deficient of certain factors and are hence "flawed." An example for this situation is personnel being pressurized to perform aircraft maintenance

**Figure 9.** *Safe, potentially unsafe, and unsafe zones.*

within a short notice, although it is practically not feasible. This may trigger personnel to take a few shortcuts in the maintenance procedures and has potential to create "holes in the cheese," which may remain latent till the bubble bursts. Sometimes it may so happen that the personnel are able to meet the short notice requirements without any error (for example, by resorting to overtime work); however, there is a danger of setting a precedent for the future and the management may demand even more output from the personnel working in a flawed environment. This may gradually result in stretching the capacity of the personnel beyond the normal limits and may lead to errors and violations in subsequent work that they are assigned.
