Reason Model in Aviation

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(1) The Reason Model has provided a means of understanding how aircraft accidents happen. Explain what other contributions this model has made to the aviation community and what are the advantages / disadvantages of the Reason Model as compared to other models used in aviation. Introduction As we know, aviation accidents and incidents are widely publicized and investigated through out the world. This is perhaps due to the large number of people which rely on air travel as an easy, quick and ‘safe’ mode of travel. According to the International Air Transport Association, in 2011, of the 2.84 billion people that chose to travel as commercial airline passengers, only 373 fatalities occurred . That means that your average chance of being one of those fatalities in 2011 was roughly one in 7.6 million people . These odds seem to be pretty good if you ask the average citizen, yet the industry is constantly striving to improve air transport safety and reduce the number of incidents and fatalities through various forms such as regulation, improved technology, training and more transparent procedures not just for pilots, but maintenance and all airline staff. Yet the question still arises, ‘how do these accidents happen with such exact regulations and requirements which must be met’? In order to understand how aviation accidents occur, James Reason devised a model called ‘The Reason Model’, also sometimes referred to as the ‘Swish cheese model’, the reason model presents the aviation industry with an explanation as to how an aviation accident occurs. James Reason hypothesized that ‘most accidents can be traced back to one or more levels of failure’(Reason 1990) . These levels include organizational influences, unsafe supervision, preconditions for unsafe acts, which are all latent failures, and the unsafe acts themselves, which are active failures . The reason model

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