Risk Management and Crew Resource Management: Making Hazards Explicit
What candidates must know
Risk management is a continuous process, not a form. Teach hazard identification, risk assessment, mitigation selection, and residual risk acceptance, with a preference for controls that eliminate or reduce hazards over controls that rely on human vigilance. Cover the hierarchy of controls conceptually, the difference between likelihood and severity, and the value of standardized assessment matrices so teams share a common language. Crew resource management content includes communication, assertiveness, briefings, workload distribution, situational awareness, and structured challenge-and-response. Address hazardous attitudes - resignation, invulnerability, impulsivity, machismo, and anti-authority - and the antidotes. Include fatigue, distraction, and complacency as recurring threats, and the role of checklists and read-backs in reducing error.
Traps that appear in questions
- Treating a completed risk form as proof that risk was managed.
- Choosing a mitigation that depends on memory or vigilance when an engineering or procedural control exists.
- Confusing likelihood with severity when scoring risk.
- Assuming a junior crew member should not challenge a senior one.
- Believing experience eliminates hazardous attitudes.
- Overlooking normalization of deviance, where repeated small exceptions become the norm.
Worked example
A crew plans a flight near a stadium with an event scheduled. Have learners list hazards, score likelihood and severity, propose controls in priority order (change location or time first, then procedural controls, then vigilance-based controls), and state the residual risk they are accepting and who accepts it. Rule of thumb: change the plan before you ask people to be more careful.
Teaching move
Ask learners to identify the weakest control in their own plan and defend it; this surfaces reliance on vigilance quickly.