Significant human risk factors in aircraft maintenance technicians

We examined significant human risk factors in aircraft maintenance technicians (AMTs) in the airline industry. We conducted an empirical study of Taiwan's airlines to determine these risk factors and to illustrate how a quantifiable evaluation approach integrates experts' opinions about the relative importance of risk factors. We developed an expert questionnaire and modified the human factors SHELL model to categorize the risk factors that we derived from the literature and the opinions of 107 senior experts. The empirical results showed that there are nine significant risk factors out of 77 preliminary and 46 primary risk factors. The results also provided support for the approach and model presented in this work, demonstrating that they are both strategically effective and practically acceptable. Analyzing and ranking the significant risk factors for AMTs in this fashion may help airlines to better focus on their major operational and managerial weaknesses in order to improve maintenance operations under the condition of limited resources. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.