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Singapore Airlines on the weekend accepted all responsibility for the SQ006 accident at Taipei, Taiwan last week, citing pilot error and effectively absolving Air Traffic Control (ATC) in Taipei of all blame. As aircraft engineering has reached the most exacting standards, the human factor is harder to control. The proportion of aircraft accidents and incidents due to the human factor has steadily increased while that due to mechanical factors have declined. One way airlines have met the problem is to train crews firstly in "Cockpit Resource Management", later broadened to "Crew Resource Management", to take in further human factors in flight operations such as cabin crew and ATC. Both are know as "CRM". The shifting of blame to the pilot is part of the airline culture where ultimately all responsibility for a flight finally rests with the captain. In reality of course, an airline flight is a complex system with interdependencies between all flight crew, cabin crew, ATC, flight operations staff, ground staff and flight planning personnel. Blaming the captain solely may reduce PR problems, in this case exacerbated by some basic PR mistakes early on such as the statement by LA SIA officials that there were no casualties, and the release of a passenger list with concurrent poor advice on the status of casualties. But it rails against the major principle of Crew Resource Management which places shared responsibility on all in the system. Such is the great paradox of the management of the human factor in flight operations, and Flight SQ006 has laid it bare. Over the next few days in this column we will be exploring the management aspects of a tragic disaster and what it means for management. For airlines, safety is key, and SQ006 represents a major disaster for a company that is respected world wide for the quality of it's management. From tomorrow and all this week we will be exploring all the management aspects of the SQ006 accident and exploring implications for the airline industry, other industries, and Asian management generally, as well as providing links to key external resources and research articles. Today we provide 4 full text related research articles that touch on various aspects. All are provided complements of Emerald Intelligence + Full Text, who also provide articles for our Weekly Research Review. Click on the article title to download the full PDF article. The first article was our featured Article of the Month for October. For those who have not yet downloaded it we have made it available for one more month given it's topicality.
Air wars in Asia: Competitive and collaborative strategies and tactics in action It has been forecast that before the turn of the millennium air travel in Asia will account for 40 percent of global travel rising to 50 percent by 2010. The International Air Transport Association also forecast world international scheduled passenger numbers to grow by an average of 7.1 percent annually to 2000, to reach 522 million. Air wars over Asia are hotting up, with some of the world's biggest airlines engaged in intense competition over Asian skies - potentially the richest and most lucrative air travel market on Planet Earth, notwithstanding the 1997 currency turmoil. This article looks at how competition in the Asia Pacific air travel industry was played out in the 1990s. A glimpse of what is to come can be drawn from the several tough skirmishes seen thus far in the 1990s. From the same author, a look at the branding aspects of Singapore Airlines.
The story of Singapore Airlines and the Singapore Girl
Daniel Chan (40 Kbs) Maps the strategic 50-year journey of Singapore Airlines (SIA) to identify the underlying factors that account for its extraordinary success and world-class stature. Both longitudinal and comparative research methodologies were employed. For the former, the approach taken was to systematically research SIA's historical development over the entire 50-year time period. SIA was studied from its very beginning and through all phases of its development to the present day. For the latter, SIA was compared with and benchmarked against other airlines. Its unique and successful product/service differentiation strategy, epitomised by the ephemeral Singapore Girl, has turned out to be enduring and difficult-to-match over the past 25 years and still shows no signs of letting up.
Keywords: Airlines, Singapore, Brands, Differentiation, Strategy, Service quality The third article explores how Crew Resource Management has been expanded to other work teams, in this case the offshore oil industry.
Crew resource management for teams in the offshore oil industry (40 Kbs) The international aviation industry uses a special form of human factors training with their flight deck crews and other teams, called crew resource management (CRM). CRM is designed by psychologists and pilots to reduce errors and accidents and to improve emergency response capability by improving teamwork skills. Key topics include communication, decision making, assertiveness and stress management. CRM courses are now being used in shipping, medicine and the nuclear power industry. Follows an outline of CRM and describes an application in the offshore oil industry with control room operators and emergency command teams.
Keywords: Oil industry, Teams, Teamwork, Training The final article today explores crisis management, and mentions Crew Resource Management. It offers some background to how the Singapore Airlines crisis of today can be handled.
Disaster stress: an emergency management perspective This paper examines the sources of stress likely to be encountered by emergency managers when responding to a disaster. Stressors relating to environmental (e.g. time pressure, level of risk, heat), organisational (e.g. bureaucracy, appropriateness of information, decision support and management systems) and operational (e.g. incident command, decision making, interagency liaison, team and media management) demands are considered. The mediating role of personality and transient states of physical (e.g. fitness and fatigue) and psychological (e.g. high levels of occupational stress) states are reviewed in terms of their influence on stress, judgement and decision making. Strategies for identifying which of these potential stress factors can be controlled or reduced and for training emergency managers to deal with the others are discussed.
Keywords: Disasters, Stress, Disaster management Tomorrow's column focuses on the culture of individualism vs the culture of teamwork in the airline industry. Further columns this week will focus on the future of Crew Resource Management (CRM) in airline and other industries, the safety record of Asian airlines, and finally implications for general and strategic management.
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