Konrad and colleagues established a preliminary taxonomy of key competencies for flight deck human factors design and certification. Their article was published as part of the Conference of the European Association for Aviation Psychology.

Acknowledging the difficulty to train new aviation human factors specialists and their strong demand on the market, the authors set to develop a validated list of competencies required in the discipline. Such a list would be useful to build school curriculum and on-the-job training to bring newcomers up to speed with the expectations for flight deck design and certification. Building from their extensive work experience in aviation human factors — having developed and certified sucessful avionics upgrades at Honeywell, Boeing, Embraer and Collins — the authors grouped 62 competencies in four domains:

1. Knowledge in human factors: fundamentals, design, analysis and evaluation
2. Knowledge in aircraft design and flight operations
3. Systems engineering
4. Certification

Note: readers can read the complete list of competencies by downloading the full paper.

Then, they surveyed 14 aviation human factors specialists to rate the importance of each competency. Respondents could also provide additional competencies and feedback. Respondents also evaluated the types of training required to join the discipline: formal education, professional experience and soft skills.

Relating to the four sub-domains of knowledge in human factors, respondents found these competencies to be the most important:

• Fundamentals
  • crew physical capabilities
  • crew physiological capabilities
  • human information processing and human error
• Design
  • Flight deck design philosophy
• Analysis
  • HF Validation of functional hazard assessments (FHA)
  • Human error analysis
  • Flight deck analyses
• Evaluation
  • Part-task / scenario-based evaluations
  • Low-, medium- and high-fidelity evaluations
  • Experimental design

Competencies found the most important for aircraft operations and systems engineering put the emphasis on mastering the pilot’s mission, whereas being skilled with the certification plan and producing certification reports were most important for the certification domain.

• Aircraft design and flight operations
  • Knowledge about overall flight deck integration
  • Knowledge about flight operations
• System engineering
  • Interface specification
  • HF program plan
• Certification
  • HF certification regulations and relevant guidelines
  • HF certification plan
  • Means of compliance
  • HF certification test plan
  • HF certification artifacts

When it comes to rating the importance of the education degree, respondents agreed that having a degree in human factors was the most important qualification. More than 50% of respondents found it important to hold a B.Sc. or M.Sc. degree whereas Ph.D. degree was not, and 50% of respondents also reported important to hold a pilot’s license, again highlighting the impact of mastering the pilot’s work.

Having existing experience in flight deck human factors (93%), human factors certification and knowledge in industry standards/guidelines were the most important professional experience rated by experts.

Surprisingly, soft-skills were also found as important skills in human factors, especially to produce certification documents. Most important soft-skills were

• Analytical thinking
• Passion for aviation and human factors
• Creativity and innovativeness
• integrity and empathy
• Technical writing and presentation skills
• Work with multi-disciplinary teams
• Speak the user language

Respondents and authors acknowledged that competencies change based on the practitioner’s role and at what stage of aircraft development the project is in. For instance, anthropometric analysis requires skills in occupational ergonomics and 3D modeling software. Working on a new avionics page will require skills in requirements elicitation and low-fidelity prototyping during the early design phases, whereas expertise in certification test plan and writing quality test report will be required in the certification phase. Respondents suggested 34 more competencies to add to the list, mostly in the human factors domain (ex. situation awareness and workload analyses), education (ex. 3D CAD ergonomics), professional experience (flight test) and soft-skills (comfortable with uncertainty).

It is also worth mentioning that when comparing existing graduate programs in human factors with the competencies highlighted in this study, one of the main domains to improve training is to master aviation certification requirements and producing certification reports.

What do you think of those competencies? Based on your experience, what skills should human factors practitioners in aviation master? Write your ideas in the comment below, we look forward to learning from your perspective!