Safety and Human performance

NLR can provide expert support during accident or incident investigations, offering specialist advice and analysis of critical data such as flight or radar records. Our team can also delve into the details of flight performance and dynamics, as well as investigate systems, components, materials, or structures through testing and analysis. This helps to uncover the root causes of incidents and inform safety improvements.

Safety performance indicators are used to assess operational safety performance through monitoring. A safety performance indicator is defined in the ICAO Safety Management Manual as a measure (or metric) used to express the level of safety performance achieved in a system. They are generally expressed in terms of the frequency of occurrences of some event causing harm, e.g., the number of fatal aircraft accidents per year or serious incidents per 10,000 flight hours. A set of indicators should also include leading indicators. These indicators do not require a safety event to take place and are metrics that provide information on the current situation that may affect future performance.

NLR can provide an objective assessment of aerospace operators, including air traffic controllers, pilots, and other professionals, evaluating their mental workload, stress levels, fatigue, attention, and alertness, as well as their activity levels, to gain a comprehensive understanding of their performance and well-being.

NLR can support the development and optimisation of human machine interfaces (HMIs) for various aerospace applications, including flight instruments, dynamic traffic signs, air traffic controller support tools, and virtual- or augmented reality based training tools. Whether it's designing a new HMI, evaluating an existing one, or updating and extending current systems, NLR can help integrate different data sources into one coherent and efficient tool. This enhances operator performance and safety.

NLR can help assess the workload of aerospace operators, including air traffic controllers, pilots, and other professionals, providing valuable insights into operator overload or underload. By combining objective and subjective data, we can accurately express workload levels, enabling informed decisions to optimise operator performance and safety.

Operators of complex systems face the challenge of processing multiple sources of information in the right order. NLR can help you gain insight into the factors affecting your operators' performance, such as distraction, attention, and strategy application. We can also help you understand how sub-optimal Human Machine Interfaces (HMIs) may lead to high visual workload, and how new tools, interfaces, or procedures may impact mental workload, fatigue, and situational awareness, ultimately affecting their ability to make informed decisions.

Ensuring the safety of aviation operations is a complex task that requires careful consideration of various factors. NLR can help you assess the impact of changes in operations or future Air Traffic Management (ATM) concepts on safety, as well as provide evidence that safety will not be compromised even when regulatory compliance is not feasible.

Analysing flight data is a crucial aspect of safety assurance, and many operators closely monitor their daily flight operations to identify any exceedances and mitigate potential risks. While commercial off-the-shelf software is available to support flight data monitoring (FDM), it often falls short when it comes to addressing complex flight operational issues. That's where NLR comes in - our team provides additional analysis capabilities and operational expertise to help you gain deeper insights into your safety performance and better understand the risks associated with your flight operations.

Taking your oversight system to the next level requires a shift from compliance-based to performance-based safety oversight. This transition enables you to focus on safety performance and risks, rather than just compliance with regulations. A key element in performance based oversight is having up-to-date knowledge of the safety performance of individual aviation organisations as well as at state level.