The Impact of Instructions on Aircraft Visual Inspection Performance: A First Look at the Overall Results

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of instructions on aircraft visual inspection performance and strategy. Forty-two inspectors from industry were asked to perform inspections of six areas of a Boeing 737. Six different instruction versions were developed for each inspection task, varying in the number and type of directed inspections. The amount of time spent inspecting, the number of calls made, and the number of the feedback calls detected all varied widely across the inspectors. However, inspectors who used instructions with a higher number of directed inspections referred to the instructions more often during and after the task, and found a higher percentage of a selected set of feedback cracks than inspectors using other instruction versions. This suggests that specific instructions can help overall inspection performance, not just performance on the defects specified. Further, instructions were shown to change the way an inspector approaches a task.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Bobo

S. N.

Puckett

C. H.

(1994). Visual Inspection for Aircraft, Draft Advisory Circular AC 43-XX, FAA Aging Aircraft Program. Atlantic City: Federal Aviation Administration.

Courtney

A. J.

(1984). A search task to assess visual lobe size. Human Factors 26 (3), pp. 289–298.

Drury

C. G.

Prabhu

P. V.

(1994). Human factors in test and inspection. In Salvendy

Karwowski

(Eds.), Design of Work and Development of Personnel in Advanced Manufacturing, Chapter 13. New York: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 355–402.

Drury

C. G.

Spencer

F. W.

(1997). Human factors and the reliability of airframe visual inspection. Proceedings of the 1997 SAE Airframe/Engine Maintenance & Repair Conference (AEMR 1997), SAE Technical Paper 972592..

Goranson

U. F.

Rogers

J. T.

(1983). Elements of Damage Tolerance Verification. 12th Symposium of International Commercial Aeronautical Fatigue, Toulouse, France.

Wenner

C. A.

(2000). Inspectors' Interpretation of Instructions in the Aircraft Maintenance Domain. Proceedings of the IEA 2000/HFES 2000 Congress. Santa Monica: Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, p. 3–116.

Wenner

Drury

Spencer

(1997). Beyond Hits and Misses: Evaluating Performance on Typical Inspection Tasks of Commuter Airline Inspectors, Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 41^st Annual Meeting. Santa Monica: Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, pp. 579–583.