A High Reliability Organization (HRO)-based Retrospective Analysis of Boeing 737 Max Crashes

Abstract

The two crashes of Boeing 737 Max aircrafts within the small span of half a year resulted in tremendous loss of life, money, and public trust in the regulatory systems responsible for ensuring passenger safety within increasingly automated aviation systems. However, these two instances of catastrophic system failure provide experts in the fields of human and organizational factors with the opportunity to transform the aviation industry, propelling it into a period of innovative automation technologies, replete with a groundbreaking reverence for system reliability, safety, and preparedness for failure. By applying the key principles of High Reliability Organization (HRO) to a retrospective analysis of the concurrent Boeing 737 Max crashes, we aim to identify relationships between defining HRO characteristics and preventative measures that Boeing, human workers, and regulatory agencies could have followed before and during the accidents’ occurrences.

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