less than six months after the portland crash, the ntsb issues the final report. it sites possible cause as quote the failure of the captain to monitor properly the aircraft s fuel state and the crew members advisories regarding fuel state. a contributing factor, the failure of the other two flight crew members to successful communicate their concern to the captain. communication in the cockpit is 95% of the success of the airplane flight itself. united 173 is a catalyst for change. the faa, federal aviation administration approves dr. deal s crm recommendation. in 1981 united airlines kicks off the industries first crm training program. united was an easy sell. remember, united lost three
crew resource management is the training all major airlines use to improve communication for flight crews. before crm the captain was the one decision-maker in the cockpit. you were expected to talk to him only when you had something tech in this case to tech say. crm breaks down the barriers of communication between two or three crew members in an airplane and enables pilots to enact as a team and come up with a common solution rather than individuals coming up with an individual solution. having crm training or not could mean the difference between a plane crashing or not. it may seem like a given that this kind of training would have always been around, but it didn t even exist until 1981. since then, crm has been the gospel in the cockpit. it comes down to one word,
team work. team work solves the problems. all of us are smarter than any of us. crm is the greece that makes the wheels resolve but you got to have the wheels turning in the right direction to begin with. the idea of crm started percolating in the 1970s after several plane crashes were attributed to communication problems in the cockpit but one accident in particular is the catalyst that puts this radical new concept on the map. on december 28th, 1978 a shocking moment when a united airlines d.c. 8 slams down in a residential neighborhood of portland, oregon. six miles shy of the airport. passenger amy ford conner, 17 at the time, is on her way back to washington state where she s about to finish her senior year
recent crashes. the giant try star left a half-mile long path of debris in the swamp. we looked the at the eastern airlines everglades crash and there we lost over 100 people started out as the landing gear light and the crew became distracted and flue into the swamp. another united d.c. 8 one year prior to the portland crash same thing, they had a landing gear problem and troubleshooting and flew into a mountain. the common link, none efficient or communication in the cockpit. this failure to communicate is literally crashing planes. deal knows something has to be done to stem the tide. he begins building a case for airlines to adopt a training procedure developed by nasa called crew resource management, crm. crm is basically promoted that if you re going to walk together as a team, you re going
you have national culture, you had corporate culture and you had pilot culture. you can t change national culture, but what the corporate culture does to mold and shape the pilot culture is critical. the incredible changes that happened in a short period of time are impressive. the industry has come a long way since the days of authoritative captains and crews reluctant to assert themselves. since crew resource management, crm, has been instituted, the number of aviation accidents has decreased significantly. crm is one of the reasons that aviation is as safe as it is today. it s one of the quantum leaps that aviation safety was able to make was making pilots better team members. it has probably been one of those things that you can t quantitatively measure, but the effect that it s had on the success and safety of aviation today has been enormous.