Basic Concepts — Page 1, Lesson 9

Welcome. I want to walk you through the opening of the Basic Concepts chapter, which starts with the history of human performance in aviation. This is where we set the stage for why we study human factors at all. The story begins in November 1783, when the first manned balloon voyage took place. Two men launched from the grounds of the Chateau de la Muette in Paris, flying a Montgolfier hot air balloon. They landed 25 minutes later, having drifted five miles and reached a height of 3000 feet. Now, here's the key problem that was immediately obvious — and it's still true today: balloons are non-steerable. They are completely dependent on the wind to provide their horizontal motive power. You can't point them where you want to go; the wind decides. To overcome that non-steerability, it became clear that a motive unit — an engine or propulsion system — was needed to turn balloons into a useful form of transport. That led to the concept of the airship. But it wasn't until 1852 that Henri Giffard was able to fly the first practical airship. Even at that early stage, though, people already realised that the future of aviation lay not with balloons and airships, but with heavier-than-air machines. The first powered aeroplane to fly was actually a model — a steam-powered aircraft designed and built by John Stringfellow in 1848. That's important because it shows the idea was being worked on long before the famous flight at Kitty Hawk. The first manned flight of a heavier-than-air machine, and the beginning of modern aviation as we know it, took place at Kitty Hawk in 1903. Orville Wright made a flight of 12 seconds in the aptly named 'Wright Flyer'. That short-duration flight — just 12 seconds — ushered in an era that has probably seen a greater number of scientific advances than any other period in history. Now, with the aircraft came aircraft accidents. In the early decades of that century — the early 1900s — a great number of these accidents, in fact the majority, were caused by equipment failure or other factors outside the control of the operators. But here's the shift that matters for your training: over the last 30 to 40 years, the major cause of aircraft accidents has been human factors. Airframes have become more reliable, modern engines and associated equipment seldom fail, and navigational equipment has improved dramatically. So the weak link has moved from the machine to the person operating it. That's the core reason we study human performance and limitations — because as the hardware got better, the human became the primary factor in accident causation. We'll build on this foundation as we go.