The Social and Psychological Aspects Behind Flight

There are a variety of psychological, cognitive and social factors that contribute to in-flight interactions between crew members, and in order to achieve optimal communication and safety levels during flight, the concept of Crew Resource Management has become increasingly important. Crew Resource Management refers to effective teamwork that requires both efficient and effective communication of pertinent information between the flight deck, cabin crew members and those not on the aircraft, but responsible for critical flight information and organization. The concept has been adapted from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration workshop in 1979 which identified various factors common amongst aviation accidents, including poor team leadership, failure to adequately delegate tasks and inadequate computer monitoring. Future implications of Crew Resource Management have extended to online training sessions to improve communication, and principles have also expanded into the fields of dentistry and medicine.

order to maintain a successful and safe flight, information needs to exist and it needs to be readily available to those who require it (Billings and Reynard, 1981). If 37% of pilots, flight attendants or grounded personnel are not even relaying pertinent information to other crew members, then the percentage of crew members who effectively communicate initially has plummeted to 63%. In addition, this 63% does not entirely consist of crew members who successfully communicate the message onto other crew members. It appears that as a message needs to arrive at an increasing 2008). It was also revealed that participants had an overall positive attitude toward CRM training with a mean of 4 out of 5 on a Likert scale. If CRM methods are to be increasingly incorporated into other career fields, such as medicine, future research needs to address variables that may increase knowledge and apply tactics to reduce individual status differences to a minimal level.
Although there is an abundance of correlational research regarding CRM training and its effectiveness on reducing pilot error, there is a paucity of experimental research on the effectiveness of CRM. According to Sauer, Darioly, Mast, Schmid and Bischof (2010), the main objective of CRM training is to provide crew members with good communication skills including receptiveness and influencing skills. In the current experimental two-by-two study, 64 males with similar post-secondary education were randomly assigned to a group that either did or did not provide communication skills training and a group that was either hierarchical in nature or of congruence. All subjects were placed in a Cabin Air Management System, which requires subjects to control a mimicked spacecraft life support system (Ibid.). Amongst numerous findings, the most significant finding was that communication skills training benefitted the hierarchical group most. The researchers suggested future research should perform a multi-level analyses to evaluate the effectiveness of CRM training in specific career fields.

Future Implications
In-class training can only be effective up to certain extent -inevitably, there will be employees that cannot attend scheduled dates. Online education offers several alternatives to in-class training: were placed into one of three groups: a single-pilot resource management (SRM) 3 group with hands-on practice, an SRM group with guided mental practice, and a control group that received no training.
Mental workload performance and situational awareness were the dependent variables -a secondary task assessment and global task assessments were used to measure the variables, respectively (Ibid.).
Results revealed that there were no significant differences between either practice conditions (hands-on practice or mental practice) because each group exhibited improved situation awareness. There was, however, a significant difference between these two practice conditions and the group that did not receive any training (Ibid.). This research suggests that "guided mental practice", which would be equivalent to an online tutorial, is equally effective in teaching CRM principles as "hands-on practice".
In the future, if both in-class and online tutorials for CRM are available to airline employees, there would be a host of benefits.
As noted by Lavitt (1992), CRM in-class training is continually evolving to include new material. For example, the Flight Safety Philadelphia Learning Centre updated their curriculum in 1992 to include tropical weather. This update was intended to educate flight crew about past tropical weather aviation accidents and teach the crew how to react to an emergency as a team. The increasing number of added courses to CRM curriculum will never cease and if airlines offered pilots and flight crew the option to engage in online courses, more employees over a large geographic span could be educated.

Medicine
Comparable to an aircraft, a hospital is an interacting dynamic of relationships between humans and machines, and between humans and humans (Doucette, 2006). Like flight crew, health care professionals such as nurses or doctors must establish effective working relationships in order to