Going beyond ‘human error’

Failures in highly technological environments, such as military aircraft, can be investigated using known tools like HFACS, the U.S. Department of Defense’s Human Factors Analysis and Classification System. However, because of some limitations, HFACS does not always highlight the deeper causal factors that contribute to such failures. In what might be the first application of the Bayes’ theorem probability formula to an HFACS dataset, Andrew Miranda examined data from 95 severe incidents to pinpoint external influences behind so-called human error.