What Aircraft Crews Know About Managing High-Pressure Situations

Crew Resource Management (CRM), first developed in 1980, is now used in civil and military aviation training worldwide. To ensure a safe flight operation, CRM requires two conditions and open communication is important to both: The hierarchy on the flight deck must be flattened (especially during emergencies); crews must be actively integrated into the flight’s workflows and decision making processes. Researchers argue that traditional business models who adopt this approach to decision making in high stakes situations will be more likely to succeed in their sectors. To support their theory, they spent the past six years studying flight crew communication in high stake situations, and interviewed a total of 61 flight crew members (pilots as well as non-pilots) in the German and Israeli air forces.