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<h2 style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif; text-align:center; margin-top:0;">When the Safety System Begins to Fail</h2>

<p style="text-align:center;">
Albert N. Clark<br>
Independent Author<br>
Published: September 1, 2026<br>
ASX Research Journal and Database<br>
ISSN 3068-3351 (Online)<br>
Place of Publication: Cadiz City, Philippines<br>
Publisher: ASXResearch.org
</p>

<h3 style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Author Note</h3>

<p>
Albert N. Clark<br>
Department of Aerospace Sciences, ASXResearch.org<br>
ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-7348-4395<br>
The author reports no conflicts of interest.<br>
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Albert N. Clark, Email: aclark@asxresearch.org
</p>

<h3 style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif; text-align:center;">Abstract</h3>

<p>
This article examines how aviation accidents can emerge from the progressive deterioration of organizational and institutional defenses rather than isolated human error. Drawing on the development of crew resource management, safety culture, quality assurance, voluntary reporting, and Safety Management Systems, the analysis explores how regulators, operators, manufacturers, military commands, training and maintenance organizations, airports, and investigative agencies form aviation’s multilayered safety architecture. Particular attention is given to normalization of deviance, staffing and experience pressures, weakened supervision, reporting culture, training deficiencies, organizational drift, and the distinction between regulatory compliance and operational resilience. Contemporary initiatives involving the Federal Aviation Administration, National Transportation Safety Board, manufacturers, the U.S. military, and DARPA are examined alongside the potential of artificial intelligence to identify institutional degradation before it enters an accident sequence. Legal and civil consequences are also considered when organizations recognize hazards but fail to act. The article concludes that the most dangerous safety system may be one that appears functional while progressively losing its ability to recognize and arrest deteriorating conditions. Future aviation safety depends upon detecting organizational drift, preserving institutional memory, protecting professional challenge, and using artificial intelligence to strengthen—not replace—the human and organizational defenses upon which aviation safety depends.
</p>

<p><i>Keywords:</i> aviation safety, organizational resilience, normalization of deviance</p>

<h3 style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif; text-align:center;">When the Safety System Begins to Fail</h3>

<p>
Aviation safety did not become reliable because pilots, mechanics, controllers, dispatchers, managers, or regulators suddenly stopped making mistakes; it became reliable because the industry gradually learned to surround fallible people with layers of institutional defense. Checklists, standardized training, maintenance inspection, independent oversight, voluntary reporting, quality assurance, recurrent qualification, accident investigation, and eventually Safety Management Systems were all built around the same uncomfortable premise: human error is inevitable, but catastrophe does not have to be. Crew resource management was especially important because it attacked the old hierarchical cockpit culture in which authority could suppress challenge and bad decisions could survive simply because the captain made them. Terzioğlu (2024) found that modern CRM remains significantly associated with flight safety culture, while Teperi et al. (2023) showed that human-factors programs become most effective when organizations move beyond regulatory compliance and transform them from an imposed requirement into an internalized professional mindset. The historical achievement of aviation safety, therefore, was not the elimination of human weakness; it was the creation of organizations expected to detect, challenge, contain, and learn from it before a single error could become an accident.
</p>

<p><b>Figure 1</b><br>
<i>When the Safety System Begins to Fail: The Progressive Erosion of Organizational Defenses, Normalization of Deviance, and the Path Toward Systemic Aviation Failure</i><br>
Note. Click image for full-size image or click here.</p>

<p>
Safety Management Systems represented the institutionalization of that philosophy. Rather than waiting for wreckage to reveal hazards, SMS was designed to make organizations continuously identify risk, evaluate controls, monitor performance, encourage reporting, and modify operations before losses occurred. The weakness in that elegant architecture is that every component ultimately depends upon organizational behavior. A reporting system is useless if employees fear retaliation; a risk register is decorative if management accepts hazards indefinitely; recurrent training becomes theater if checking standards drift downward; and safety assurance is meaningless when the organization repeatedly verifies compliance without determining whether the underlying control actually works. Adjekum et al. (2023) demonstrated why generative voluntary reporting cultures are valuable precisely because frontline personnel often possess information about emerging hazards that formal organizational structures have not yet recognized. Key et al. (2023), working specifically with aviation safety culture, similarly found that safety culture can be measured and that it predicts important individual and organizational outcomes. These findings expose the central question of this paper: when credible warning information exists, why does an aviation organization sometimes fail to act on it?
</p>

<p>
One answer is normalization of deviance, a process far more dangerous than simple rule-breaking because it converts abnormal conditions into accepted reality. A shortcut works once, then again; a staffing deficit causes no accident; an inspection discrepancy proves harmless; a runway conflict ends with adequate separation; a controller manages an excessive workload without consequence; a maintenance team improvises around an unavailable part or incomplete record; and each successful outcome quietly becomes evidence that the unsafe condition was apparently safe after all. Sedlar et al. (2023), in a systematic review of normalization of deviance across high-risk industries, found that the phenomenon develops through repeated acceptance of departures from expected standards when adverse consequences fail to occur. Aviation is particularly vulnerable because its overall accident rate is so low that organizations can accumulate thousands of successful operations while underlying defenses deteriorate. The resulting institutional trap is brutal: absence of an accident is mistaken for evidence of control effectiveness. The system begins teaching itself that warning signs are normal, and eventually the organization is no longer managing risk; it is managing its familiarity with risk.
</p>

<p>
Maintenance provides one of the clearest windows into this process because maintenance safety depends simultaneously on technical competence, documentation, supervision, quality assurance, scheduling pressure, staffing, communication, and willingness to stop work. Aktas and Kagnicioglu (2023) found that organizational and individual factors significantly influence the safety behavior of aircraft maintenance technicians, reinforcing the point that technician performance cannot be separated from the environment created around the technician. Truong and Lee (2025) likewise found that aviation-maintenance safety culture requires a multidimensional framework rather than simple regulatory compliance, while Tyagi et al. (2023) showed that learning from previous maintenance events is essential to effective safety management. The institutional danger appears when an organization has all the required mechanisms on paper but the mechanisms become disconnected from operations: inspection becomes a signature, quality assurance becomes a production checkpoint, recurrent training becomes a calendar requirement, and a shortage of experienced technicians is compensated for by distributing responsibility among increasingly junior personnel. None of those conditions necessarily produces an immediate accident. Together, however, they can hollow out the very defenses that maintenance regulation was designed to create.
</p>

<p>
The same problem exists in flight operations and training. An airline can satisfy licensing, checking, simulator, duty, and qualification requirements while simultaneously becoming less resilient if experience is disappearing faster than it is being transferred. Chan et al. (2025) found that pilots with different training backgrounds attribute causal factors in safety events differently, which has direct implications for how airlines interpret incidents and design safety interventions. That matters because an organization whose workforce is increasingly junior cannot assume that identical certificates represent identical judgment, threat recognition, or operational context. Culture complicates the problem further. Pratama and Caponecchia (2025), reviewing research on national culture and aviation safety, found meaningful relationships between cultural factors and communication, human error, interaction, and safety performance. Consequently, airlines and training organizations cannot simply install CRM, SMS, and reporting programs as generic administrative products and assume equivalent outcomes. If deference discourages challenge, if instructors are overloaded, if checking becomes predictable, if staffing shortages discourage removal of marginal personnel from line operations, or if managers treat training failures primarily as production problems, the system can remain formally compliant while its real safety margin contracts.
</p>

<p>
Air traffic control illustrates the institutional issue even more starkly because controller performance is inseparable from staffing, traffic design, procedures, supervisory decisions, technology, and workload. Zamarreño Suárez et al. (2024) documented the extensive relationship between controller workload and safety, emphasizing that workload is not merely an individual endurance problem but a systems problem influenced by traffic complexity and operational design. The January 29, 2025 collision over the Potomac River subsequently provided an unusually severe demonstration of what happens when multiple institutional defenses fail together. In its 2026 final report, the NTSB identified systemic problems including FAA helicopter-route design, failure to evaluate and respond adequately to safety data, overreliance on visual separation, workload problems associated with combined control positions, and Army deficiencies involving helicopter operations and training; critically, the investigation did not reduce the disaster to one incompetent controller or pilot. That distinction matters. An accident caused by one reckless person can often be addressed by removing the person. An accident emerging from route design, operational policy, supervision, workload, training, technology, and ignored precursor data indicts the architecture that was supposed to prevent individual mistakes from becoming fatal.
</p>

<p>
Manufacturers are now confronting the same organizational question, and Boeing provides the most visible contemporary example. Following the 737 MAX crises and the January 2024 Alaska Airlines door-plug separation, Boeing expanded its enterprise Safety Management System, created stronger reporting mechanisms, reorganized safety responsibilities, increased workforce training, and developed its Boeing Safety Intelligence platform, which uses machine learning and advanced modeling to identify product and fleet safety signals. The NTSB’s investigation of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 nevertheless showed why institutional reform cannot be judged by program names alone: missing door-plug bolts, inadequate production documentation, training deficiencies, ineffective oversight, and weaknesses in FAA auditing combined into a failure that should have been detected long before the airplane entered service. Airbus is pursuing a parallel but less crisis-driven approach, explicitly integrating open reporting, safety promotion, training, and SMS across its commercial, military, and unmanned-aircraft activities. The lesson is not that one manufacturer is safe and another unsafe; it is that manufacturers are increasingly treating safety culture, data analysis, employee reporting, and organizational design as engineering inputs rather than administrative matters.
</p>

<p>
Military aviation faces an even harder version of the problem because its safety system must coexist with mission urgency, tactical secrecy, command authority, combat realism, equipment limitations, and acceptance of risks that civil aviation would never tolerate. Fogarty et al. (2018) demonstrated in military aviation that safety climate is shaped by the balance between operational demands and organizational resources; high demand becomes especially dangerous when personnel perceive inadequate support, control, or resources. The U.S. Army’s response after the Potomac collision illustrates institutional adaptation rather than simple blame: changes have included tighter control of helicopter operations around Washington, changes involving ADS-B use, revised training practices, separation of some routine training from sensitive missions, and broader surveillance-equipment upgrades. This is precisely what a functioning safety system should do after identifying a systemic weakness: alter equipment, procedures, training, supervision, and operational policy together. Yet military organizations also face the danger of corrective-action decay. A post-accident surge in attention may produce dramatic improvements for several years, after which turnover, mission pressure, budget cycles, and institutional memory can gradually recreate the conditions that reform was intended to eliminate.
</p>

<p>
DARPA is tackling a related problem, but it is important not to claim more than the evidence supports. DARPA is not running a public program whose stated mission is to repair deteriorating airline safety culture, FAA oversight, maintenance quality assurance, or aviation workforce standards. Its Air Combat Evolution program instead uses autonomous air combat as a demanding test environment for building justified human trust in artificial intelligence and for understanding complex human-machine collaboration. That work is enormously relevant to the future of institutional safety because AI systems could eventually monitor trends that humans and fragmented departments miss: recurring unstable approaches, abnormal maintenance deferrals, fatigue patterns, reporting suppression, controller workload, training-performance drift, precursor combinations, or deviations becoming statistically normal. But automation cannot cure a dishonest organization. If executives define inconvenient data out of existence, supervisors discourage reports, commanders normalize risk, or regulators lack resources, the most sophisticated predictive system in the world becomes another dashboard to ignore. Elon Musk is even further removed from this particular problem. SpaceX is deeply engaged with federal aviation regulation and autonomous aerospace technology, but there is no credible public evidence that Musk, SpaceX, Tesla, or xAI is presently leading a program specifically aimed at correcting institutional degradation within airline, airport, maintenance, ATC, or military aviation safety systems. Claims that he is solving this particular problem would therefore outrun the evidence.
</p>

<p>
The FAA and NTSB are much more directly involved, although their roles differ profoundly. The FAA regulates and operates portions of the system and has progressively expanded mandatory SMS requirements; its 2024 rule broadened Part 5 SMS obligations to additional certificate holders and aviation organizations, while the 2023 airport SMS rule was explicitly intended to move certificated airports from traditional compliance toward proactive and eventually predictive risk management. The NTSB does not regulate; it investigates, identifies systemic failures, and recommends changes, and for years it has pushed broader and more effective implementation of SMS because nominal existence is not the same as verified effectiveness. Local, county, and state governments also occupy a larger role than is sometimes recognized because many public-use airports are owned or operated by cities, counties, airport authorities, or states. Under Part 139, those public entities may carry direct responsibility for runway safety, aircraft rescue and firefighting, wildlife control, fueling safety, markings, construction hazards, emergency planning, and—in covered airports—SMS implementation. Thus institutional aviation safety is not a federal pyramid with Washington at the top; it is a network in which a county airport operations office, municipal fire department, state aviation agency, airline safety department, manufacturer, military unit, and federal regulator may all control different pieces of the same accident pathway.
</p>

<p>
The legal consequences of institutional failure are equally systemic. When evidence shows that an organization knew or should have known of a recurring hazard yet failed to act, litigation can move beyond the frontline employee toward negligent hiring, training, supervision, retention, maintenance, operational control, product design, failure to warn, or organizational negligence, depending on the jurisdiction and facts. Airlines, manufacturers, maintenance providers, airport operators, contractors, and other private entities may face wrongful-death and personal-injury claims, while claims involving the FAA or other federal agencies implicate the Federal Tort Claims Act and its exceptions; military involvement creates additional statutory and sovereign-immunity complications, and state or municipal airport defendants may have separate governmental-immunity protections that vary by jurisdiction. Civil discovery can be devastating because internal emails, hazard reports, staffing records, audit findings, training failures, voluntary reports where legally discoverable, quality data, risk assessments, and management discussions may establish not merely that a hazard existed but that the organization had been warned. Criminal liability is far rarer and requires a substantially different evidentiary threshold, but deliberate falsification, obstruction, reckless conduct, or knowing regulatory violations can transform a safety breakdown into an enforcement or criminal matter. For safety leaders, the implication should not be “document less”; it should be the opposite: identify hazards candidly, document decisions intelligently, assign responsibility, verify mitigations, and never allow the written safety system to become evidence that management knew what needed to be done and chose not to do it.
</p>

<p>
The most important future development will therefore not be another layer of regulation by itself, another mandatory training module, or another artificial-intelligence product. It will be the transition from compliance-based safety management to continuously verified institutional resilience. The next generation of aviation safety systems should be capable of detecting not merely violations but drift: declining report rates, increasing training repeats, instructor shortages, maintenance rework, deferred discrepancies, overtime patterns, unstable staffing, recurring procedural workarounds, abnormal controller workload, weak supervisory intervention, and clusters of events that appear harmless individually but dangerous collectively. The central finding of this analysis is more troubling than the claim that aviation personnel are simply becoming less competent. It is that human performance can deteriorate in plain sight while every surrounding institution remains technically functional. The regulator still regulates, the airline still trains, the military still qualifies, the manufacturer still audits, the maintenance department still signs the paperwork, the airport still conducts inspections, and the SMS still produces reports—yet the defenses can become progressively less capable of stopping the accident sequence. That is when the safety system begins to fail: not when it disappears, but when it continues to exist while losing the courage, competence, authority, information flow, and institutional memory required to say no. The future role of AI should be to make that erosion harder to hide, not to provide aviation with a technological excuse for allowing it to continue.
</p>

<h3 style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">References</h3>

<p>
Adjekum, D. K., Afari, S. A., Owusu-Amponsah, N. Y., Waller, Z., Rasouli, V., Ullrich, G., Snyder, P., & Corbin, N. (2023). Development of a generative voluntary safety reporting culture (GVSRC) model for the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) oil and gas (O & G) sector using attributes of the Aviation Safety Action Program (ASAP). <i>Safety Science, 161</i>, 106073. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2023.106073
</p>

<p>
Aktas, E., & Kagnicioglu, C. H. (2023). Factors affecting safety behaviors of aircraft maintenance technicians: A study on civil aviation industry in Turkey. <i>Safety Science, 164</i>, 106146. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2023.106146
</p>

<p>
Chan, W. T.-K., Li, W.-C., & Braithwaite, G. (2025). Pilots’ training backgrounds affecting the attribution of event causal factors and airline safety management. <i>Journal of Air Transport Management, 125</i>, 102786. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jairtraman.2025.102786
</p>

<p>
Fogarty, G. J., Cooper, R., & McMahon, S. (2018). A demands–resources view of safety climate in military aviation. <i>Aviation Psychology and Applied Human Factors, 8</i>(2), 76–85. https://doi.org/10.1027/2192-0923/a000141
</p>

<p>
Key, K. N., Choi, I., Hu, P. T., & Schroeder, D. J. (2023). Validating a safety culture toolkit for aviation. <i>Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 67</i>(1), 2030–2034. https://doi.org/10.1177/21695067231192404
</p>

<p>
Pratama, G. B., & Caponecchia, C. (2025). Examining the influence of national culture on aviation safety: A systematic review. <i>Journal of Safety Research, 92</i>, 317–330. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2024.11.020
</p>

<p>
Sedlar, N., Irwin, A., Martin, D., & Roberts, R. (2023). A qualitative systematic review on the application of normalization of deviance within high-risk industries. <i>Journal of Safety Research, 84</i>, 290–305. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2022.11.005
</p>

<p>
Teperi, A.-M., Paajanen, T., Asikainen, I., & Lantto, E. (2023). From must to mindset: Outcomes of human factor practices in aviation and railway companies. <i>Safety Science, 158</i>, 105968. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2022.105968
</p>

<p>
Terzioğlu, M. (2024). The effects of crew resource management on flight safety culture: Corporate crew resource management (CRM 7.0). <i>The Aeronautical Journal, 128</i>(1326), 1743–1766. https://doi.org/10.1017/aer.2023.113
</p>

<p>
Truong, D., & Lee, S. A. (2025). Developing a new safety culture framework for aviation maintenance: Preliminary results. <i>Safety Science, 183</i>, 106729. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2024.106729
</p>

<p>
Tyagi, A., Tripathi, R., & Bouarfa, S. (2023). Learning from past in the aircraft maintenance industry: An empirical evaluation in the safety management framework. <i>Heliyon, 9</i>(11), e21620. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e21620
</p>

<p>
Zamarreño Suárez, M., Arnaldo Valdés, R. M., Pérez Moreno, F., Delgado-Aguilera Jurado, R., López de Frutos, P. M., & Gómez Comendador, V. F. (2024). Understanding the research on air traffic controller workload and its implications for safety: A science mapping-based analysis. <i>Safety Science, 176</i>, 106545. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2024.106545
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</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td width="266" valign="top" align="left">
<a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/8/8e/Pilot_Shortage_3000.jpg/1599px-Pilot_Shortage_3000.jpg?20260827114121" target="_blank" rel="noopener">
<img src="https://asxresearch.org/images/c/c1/Pilot_Shortage_600.jpg?20260827114026" width="266" border="0">
</a><br>
<div style="width:266px; text-align:center; margin-top:5px;"><a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/8/8e/Pilot_Shortage_3000.jpg/1599px-Pilot_Shortage_3000.jpg?20260827114121" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><b>Global Pilot Shortage</b></div>
</td>

<td width="266" valign="top" align="left">
<a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/3/3a/Hydrogen_II_3000.jpg/1564px-Hydrogen_II_3000.jpg?20260827114333" target="_blank" rel="noopener">
<img src="https://asxresearch.org/images/9/9f/Hydrogen_II_600.jpg?20260827114207" width="266" border="0">
</a><br>
<div style="width:266px; text-align:center; margin-top:5px;"><a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/3/3a/Hydrogen_II_3000.jpg/1564px-Hydrogen_II_3000.jpg?20260827114333" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><b>Liquid Hydrogen Powered Aircraft</b></div>
</td>

<td width="266" valign="top" align="left">
<a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/9/9c/Hydrogen_jet_3000.jpg/1564px-Hydrogen_jet_3000.jpg?20260827114533" target="_blank" rel="noopener">
<img src="https://asxresearch.org/images/1/13/Hydrogen_jet_600.jpg?20260827114451" width="266" border="0">
</a><br>
<div style="width:266px; text-align:center; margin-top:5px;"><a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/9/9c/Hydrogen_jet_3000.jpg/1564px-Hydrogen_jet_3000.jpg?20260827114533" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><b>Liquid Hydrogen Infrastructure</b></div>
</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td width="266" valign="top" align="left">
<a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/d/dd/AI_Assist_2000.jpg/1564px-AI_Assist_2000.jpg?20260811064249" target="_blank" rel="noopener">
<img src="https://asxresearch.org/images/6/64/AI_Assist_600.jpg?20260811064144" width="266" border="0">
</a><br>
<div style="width:266px; text-align:center; margin-top:5px;"><a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/d/dd/AI_Assist_2000.jpg/1564px-AI_Assist_2000.jpg?20260811064249" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><b>AI Assist and Humans</b></div>
</td>

<td width="266" valign="top" align="left">
<a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/c/c1/Airbus_v_Boeing_2000.jpg/1594px-Airbus_v_Boeing_2000.jpg?20260811064650" target="_blank" rel="noopener">
<img src="https://asxresearch.org/images/1/1e/Airbus_v_Boeing_600.jpg?20260811064517" width="266" border="0">
</a><br>
<div style="width:266px; text-align:center; margin-top:5px;"><a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/c/c1/Airbus_v_Boeing_2000.jpg/1594px-Airbus_v_Boeing_2000.jpg?20260811064650" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><b>Airbus v. Boeing</b></div>
</td>

<td width="266" valign="top" align="left">
<a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/3/36/Airfare_Miles_2000.jpg/1600px-Airfare_Miles_2000.jpg?20260811065227" target="_blank" rel="noopener">
<img src="https://asxresearch.org/images/1/14/Airfare_Miles_600.jpg?20260811065026" width="266" border="0">
</a><br>
<div style="width:266px; text-align:center; margin-top:5px;"><a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/3/36/Airfare_Miles_2000.jpg/1600px-Airfare_Miles_2000.jpg?20260811065227" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><b>Airfare Miles Compared</b></div>
</td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td width="266" valign="top" align="left">
<a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/0/06/Airline_Productivity_2000.jpg/1563px-Airline_Productivity_2000.jpg?20260811072601" target="_blank" rel="noopener">
<img src="https://asxresearch.org/images/9/94/Airline_Productivity_600.jpg?20260811072514" width="266" border="0">
</a><br>
<div style="width:266px; text-align:center; margin-top:5px;"><a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/0/06/Airline_Productivity_2000.jpg/1563px-Airline_Productivity_2000.jpg?20260811072601" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><b>Airline Labor Management</b></div>
</td>

<td width="266" valign="top" align="left">
<a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/a/a0/Crew_Pairing_2000.jpg/1600px-Crew_Pairing_2000.jpg?20260811073623" target="_blank" rel="noopener">
<img src="https://asxresearch.org/images/f/ff/CP_460.jpg?20260811084723" width="266" border="0">
</a><br>
<div style="width:266px; text-align:center; margin-top:5px;"><a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/a/a0/Crew_Pairing_2000.jpg/1600px-Crew_Pairing_2000.jpg?20260811073623" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><b>Crew Pairing</b></div>
</td>

<td width="266" valign="top" align="left">
<a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/3/31/Hub_and_Spoke_2000.jpg/1600px-Hub_and_Spoke_2000.jpg?20260811074542" target="_blank" rel="noopener">
<img src="https://asxresearch.org/images/f/fb/Hub_and_Spoke_600b2.jpg?20260811083314" width="266" border="0">
</a><br>
<div style="width:266px; text-align:center; margin-top:5px;"><a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/3/31/Hub_and_Spoke_2000.jpg/1600px-Hub_and_Spoke_2000.jpg?20260811074542" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><b>Hub and Spoke</b></div>
</td>

</tr>
<tr>
<td width="266" valign="top" align="left">
<a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/1/1e/Al_Clark.jpg/1600px-Al_Clark.jpg?20260811083826" target="_blank" rel="noopener">
<img src="https://asxresearch.org/images/1/1e/Week_3_Hub_and_Spoke1_600.jpg?20260811083511" width="266" border="0">
</a><br>
<div style="width:266px; text-align:center; margin-top:5px;"><a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/1/1e/Al_Clark.jpg/1600px-Al_Clark.jpg?20260811083826" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><b>Hub and Spoke Choice</b></div>
</td>

<td width="266" valign="top" align="left">
<a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/8/86/Airline_routing2_2000.jpg/1550px-Airline_routing2_2000.jpg?20260811085619" target="_blank" rel="noopener">
<img src="https://asxresearch.org/images/9/92/Airline_routing2_600.jpg?20260811085512" width="266" border="0">
</a><br>
<div style="width:266px; text-align:center; margin-top:5px;"><a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/8/86/Airline_routing2_2000.jpg/1550px-Airline_routing2_2000.jpg?20260811085619" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><b>Airline Routing</b></div>
</td>

<td width="266" valign="top" align="left">
<a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/6/69/Airline_routing_2000.jpg/1516px-Airline_routing_2000.jpg?20260811085753" target="_blank" rel="noopener">
<img src="https://asxresearch.org/images/6/6e/Airline_routing_600.jpg?20260811085718" width="266" border="0">
</a><br>
<div style="width:266px; text-align:center; margin-top:5px;"><a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/6/69/Airline_routing_2000.jpg/1516px-Airline_routing_2000.jpg?20260811085753" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><b>Airline Routing Challenges</b></div>
</td>

</tr>
<tr>
<td width="266" valign="top" align="left">
<a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/e/e7/Financing_2000b.jpg/1555px-Financing_2000b.jpg?20260812102348" target="_blank" rel="noopener">
<img src="https://asxresearch.org/images/1/1d/Financing_600b.jpg?20260812102303" width="266" border="0">
</a><br>
<div style="width:266px; text-align:center; margin-top:5px;"><a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/e/e7/Financing_2000b.jpg/1555px-Financing_2000b.jpg?20260812102348" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><b>Aircraft Financing</b></div>
</td>

<td width="266" valign="top" align="left">
<a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/0/09/Supersonic_2000h.jpg/736px-Supersonic_2000h.jpg?20260812133017" target="_blank" rel="noopener">
<img src="https://asxresearch.org/images/e/eb/Supersonic_460h_2.jpg?20260812133250" width="266" border="0">
</a><br>
<div style="width:266px; text-align:center; margin-top:5px;"><a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/0/09/Supersonic_2000h.jpg/736px-Supersonic_2000h.jpg?20260812133017" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><b>Sonic Boom Mitigation</b></div>
</td>

<td width="266" valign="top" align="left">
<a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/7/78/Supersonic2_2000w.jpg/1563px-Supersonic2_2000w.jpg?20260812134528" target="_blank" rel="noopener">
<img src="https://asxresearch.org/images/1/14/Supersonic2_600w.jpg?20260812134440" width="266" border="0">
</a><br>
<div style="width:266px; text-align:center; margin-top:5px;"><a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/7/78/Supersonic2_2000w.jpg/1563px-Supersonic2_2000w.jpg?20260812134528" target="_blank" rel="noopener"><b>SST Airspace Integration</b></div>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>

<td width="266" valign="top" align="left">
<a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/c/cf/Art_Sec_1-1_2000.jpg/1563px-Art_Sec_1-1_2000.jpg?20260814085750"
target="_blank" rel="noopener">
<img src="https://asxresearch.org/images/f/fb/Art_Sec_1-1_600.jpg?20260814085700"
width="266" border="0">
</a><br>
<div style="width:266px; text-align:center; margin-top:5px;">
<a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/c/cf/Art_Sec_1-1_2000.jpg/1563px-Art_Sec_1-1_2000.jpg?20260814085750"
target="_blank" rel="noopener"><b>From Props to Jets One</b></a>
</div>
</td>

<td width="266" valign="top" align="left">
<a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/a/a0/Art_Sec_1-2_2000.jpg/1600px-Art_Sec_1-2_2000.jpg?20260814085920"
target="_blank" rel="noopener">
<img src="https://asxresearch.org/images/2/25/Art_Sec_1-2_600.jpg?20260814085842"
width="266" border="0">
</a><br>
<div style="width:266px; text-align:center; margin-top:5px;">
<a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/a/a0/Art_Sec_1-2_2000.jpg/1600px-Art_Sec_1-2_2000.jpg?20260814085920"
target="_blank" rel="noopener"><b>From Props to Jets Two</b></a>
</div>
</td>

<td width="266" valign="top" align="left">
<a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/e/e3/Art_Sec_1-3_2000.jpg/1563px-Art_Sec_1-3_2000.jpg?20260814090037"
target="_blank" rel="noopener">
<img src="https://asxresearch.org/images/0/08/Art_Sec_1-3_600.jpg?20260814090002"
width="266" border="0">
</a><br>
<div style="width:266px; text-align:center; margin-top:5px;">
<a href="https://asxresearch.org/images/thumb/e/e3/Art_Sec_1-3_2000.jpg/1563px-Art_Sec_1-3_2000.jpg?20260814090037"
target="_blank" rel="noopener"><b>From Props to Jets Three</b></a>
</div>
</td>

</tr>
</table>
</div>
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2026-08-31T07:07:57Z

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<h2 style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif; text-align:center; margin-top:0;">The Erosion of the Human Safety Margin</h2>

<p style="text-align:center;">
Albert N. Clark<br>
Independent Author<br>
Published: August 31, 2026<br>
ASX Research Journal and Database<br>
ISSN 3068-3351 (Online)<br>
Place of Publication: Cadiz City, Philippines<br>
Publisher: ASXResearch.org
</p>

<h3 style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Author Note</h3>

<p>
Albert N. Clark<br>
Department of Aerospace Sciences, ASXResearch.org<br>
ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-7348-4395<br>
The author reports no conflicts of interest.<br>
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Albert N. Clark, Email: aclark@asxresearch.org
</p>

<h3 style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif; text-align:center;">Abstract</h3>

<p>
This article examines whether aviation’s human safety margin is being systematically eroded by experience loss, staffing shortages, compressed training pipelines, automation dependence, fatigue, weakened supervision, and the normalization of degraded operating conditions. Rather than arguing that modern aviation professionals are inherently less capable than previous generations, the analysis focuses on the institutional and operational conditions that shape proficiency among pilots, air traffic controllers, maintenance technicians, military aviators, and other frontline personnel. Historical development, contemporary accident and incident evidence, workforce pressures, training trends, military safety experience, regulatory oversight, and organizational culture are evaluated alongside emerging responses from manufacturers, government agencies, and advanced technology programs. The article argues that aviation faces a dangerous transition in which qualification may increasingly be mistaken for experience and automation may be used to compensate for weakened human resilience instead of reinforcing it. The central conclusion is that artificial intelligence and advanced automation should strengthen an already competent human system rather than become substitutes for declining training depth, mentorship, judgment, and professional standards.
</p>

<p><i>Keywords:</i> aviation safety, human performance, professional standards</p>

<h3 style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif; text-align:center;">The Erosion of the Human Safety Margin</h3>

<p>
Commercial aviation has been quietly moving toward the single-pilot question for decades, long before artificial intelligence made the idea sound technologically fashionable.
</p>

<p>
The proposition that aviation’s human element is deteriorating deserves to be treated neither as nostalgia nor as a foregone conclusion. The evidence does not support the crude assertion that today’s pilots, controllers, mechanics, military aviators, dispatchers, firefighters, and ground personnel are simply less intelligent or less conscientious than their predecessors. It does, however, support a more disturbing diagnosis: in important portions of the aviation system, experienced people are retiring faster than institutional knowledge can be replaced; increasingly junior workforces are being asked to absorb sophisticated responsibilities quickly; staffing shortages and production pressures compress training and supervision; automation reduces opportunities to practice perishable skills; fatigue and workload remain stubbornly resistant to administrative solutions; and organizations can gradually become accustomed to operating closer to the edge because yesterday’s shortcut did not produce an accident. Sedlar et al. (2023) describe normalization of deviance as the gradual acceptance of departures from established standards after repeated exposure to those departures without an adverse consequence. That mechanism is a far more useful explanation than generational contempt. The erosion of the human safety margin is therefore not necessarily a decline in humanity’s biological capability; it is frequently the foreseeable product of deliberate decisions about staffing, scheduling, training, experience, cost, automation, organizational tolerance, and how much resilience may be removed before anybody notices. Aviation is extraordinarily safe precisely because generations before us built layers of human redundancy into it. The danger begins when those layers are quietly treated as excess capacity rather than safety infrastructure.
</p>

<p><b>Figure 1</b><br>
<i>The Erosion of the Human Safety Margin: Pressures, Warning Signs, and the Path Toward Recovery in Modern Aviation</i><br>
Note. Click image for full-size image or click here.</p>

<p>
Historically, aviation learned professional competence through blood. Early pilots possessed enormous manual skill but operated in a system with primitive navigation, weak weather forecasting, little standardization, minimal human-factors knowledge, and almost no institutional protection against poor judgment. As technology improved, aviation progressively professionalized the human side as well: instrument standards, recurrent checking, type ratings, maintenance certification, formal air traffic control, crew resource management, military standardization, dispatch systems, accident investigation, and eventually Safety Management Systems. That progression matters because modern safety was never produced by better airplanes alone; it resulted from increasingly disciplined people operating inside increasingly disciplined organizations. Kelly and Efthymiou (2019), examining 50 controlled-flight-into-terrain accidents across commercial, military, and general aviation, found recurring decision errors, skill-based errors, communication deficiencies, planning problems, distraction, complacency, and fatigue despite decades of technological advancement. The implication is uncomfortable: technology can eliminate old failure modes while leaving human vulnerability perfectly capable of creating new ones. The historic answer was recurrent proficiency, supervision, standardization, and layered defense. When those defenses are weakened, the system can regress without the aircraft themselves becoming any less sophisticated. This is especially important in military aviation, where Li and Harris (2013) analyzed 523 military aircraft accidents and identified judgment and decision-making deficiencies along with systemic training weaknesses. Their findings reject the convenient fiction that an accident attributed to “pilot error” begins and ends with the person holding the controls. A deficient pilot can be an individual problem; a pattern of deficient pilots is an organizational product.
</p>

<p>
Commercial flight operations illustrate the paradox particularly well. Airlines increasingly recruit through heterogeneous pipelines—traditional civilian time-building, sponsored cadet programs, military transition, university programs, and accelerated pathways—while simultaneously operating aircraft whose automation makes routine line flying extraordinarily stable. Chan et al. (2025) found that pilots’ initial training backgrounds produce persistent differences in how they perceive and attribute accident causal factors, including how readily they identify latent organizational conditions. That does not make one pipeline inherently unsafe, but it does demonstrate that equivalent licenses do not create identical professional perspectives. Meanwhile, proficiency itself is perishable. Ebbatson et al. (2010) found significant relationships between recent manual-flying experience and transport-pilot manual-control performance, confirming that automation can preserve operational efficiency while reducing opportunities to exercise skills that suddenly become crucial when automation degrades. This creates the possibility of a highly credentialed pilot who is superbly competent at managing the normal automated system but less practiced at recovering when that system ceases behaving normally. The appropriate response is not romantic advocacy for hand-flying every transport leg; it is evidence-based recurrent training deliberately designed around improbable, compound, automation-degraded situations. The workforce pressure intensifies the problem. Boeing’s 2026 Pilot and Technician Outlook projects a global requirement for roughly 674,000 new commercial pilots and 728,000 new maintenance technicians over the next twenty years. Boeing’s 2025 outlook explicitly described a period of workforce “juniority” and stressed competency-based training, digital technologies, mixed reality, artificial intelligence, and machine learning as methods for increasing training effectiveness. When an industry must replace that many experienced professionals while simultaneously expanding, experience compression ceases to be an anecdote and becomes a strategic safety problem.
</p>

<p>
Air traffic control may be the clearest demonstration that competence cannot be separated from the environment in which competent people are required to perform. Zamarreño Suárez et al. (2024), reviewing 374 studies of controller workload, concluded that workload management, assessment, prediction, complexity, and human-centered operational conditions remain fundamental to air-traffic safety. Li et al. (2023) demonstrated that rotating rosters produce accumulated controller fatigue capable of degrading cognitive performance and showed that scientifically designed fatigue interventions can improve resilience. These are not accusations that controllers are becoming careless; they demonstrate that highly trained professionals remain biological organisms whose performance can be degraded by staffing patterns and scheduling. The FAA itself acknowledges a longstanding staffing problem. Its 2026–2028 Controller Workforce Plan reports that 2,028 trainees were hired during FY2025 while 1,460 people were lost through Academy attrition, training failures, retirement, resignation, promotion, and other separation, yielding a net workforce gain of 568; the agency plans progressively larger hiring classes through FY2028. That hiring surge is necessary, but hiring is not synonymous with certification, and certification is not synonymous with seasoned judgment. Every accelerated pipeline creates an unavoidable interval during which veterans are disproportionately responsible for training newcomers while simultaneously operating the system. The real safety question therefore is not whether standards have formally been lowered; it is whether the operational environment provides enough time, mentorship, staffing, recovery, and repetition for new controllers to attain the practical depth that experienced controllers once accumulated under different workforce conditions.
</p>

<p>
Aircraft maintenance presents the same phenomenon in a less visible form. Maintenance failures rarely appear before the public as dramatic evidence of a deteriorating workforce; they are buried in inspection findings, repeat discrepancies, paperwork, deferred defects, installation errors, communication failures, and organizational pressures until one eventually survives every barrier. Aktas and Kagnicioglu (2023) found that maintenance technicians’ safety behavior is strongly influenced by safety leadership and safety climate, and that technicians can be less willing to report unsafe conditions involving their own teams. That finding is important because competence without reporting courage is an incomplete safety defense. Tyagi et al. (2023) similarly found that learning from past maintenance events depends critically on safety communication and on organizations contextualizing and evaluating lessons rather than merely possessing accident information. In other words, a maintenance organization can technically “know” about a previous failure and still fail to learn from it. The coming manpower problem makes that vulnerability harder to dismiss. Boeing’s forecast of hundreds of thousands of new technicians implies a huge transfer of tacit knowledge from retiring mechanics and inspectors to a younger workforce just as fleets, avionics, composites, software, engines, and maintenance analytics become more complex. The danger is not young mechanics; it is an industrial system tempted to treat certification as a substitute for mentorship and throughput as a substitute for craftsmanship. A mechanic who knows which manual paragraph applies is necessary. A mechanic who has seen a subtle defect before, recognizes when the paperwork does not make sense, stops a job under schedule pressure, and can explain why something merely “looks wrong” represents a different level of safety capability. That knowledge is expensive to build and very easy to lose.
</p>

<p>
Military aviation deserves special scrutiny because the hypothesis of universal decline encounters both supporting and contradictory evidence there. Li and Harris’s earlier findings demonstrate that training deficiencies and poor tactical decision-making can become systemic military accident factors, but current U.S. Army data show why careless generalization would be scientifically dishonest. Army Aviation reported five Class A flight mishaps in FY2025 compared with fifteen in FY2024, producing a manned Class A flight mishap rate of 0.66 per 100,000 flying hours—described by the Army as the third-best rate in its recorded history. More revealingly, the Army specifically attributed part of the improvement to closing a training gap involving unanticipated right yaw and loss-of-tail-rotor-effectiveness events that had emerged in FY2023 and FY2024. That sequence is almost a laboratory demonstration of the argument advanced in this paper: proficiency can erode, the erosion can manifest operationally, and a competent institution can identify the deficiency, restore training, and improve the outcome. Military aviation therefore should not be portrayed simply as another decaying institution. It is better understood as an environment where operational tempo, personnel turnover, complex aircraft, combat priorities, and training-resource constraints can expose proficiency gaps quickly—and where aggressive standardization can sometimes repair them just as quickly. The lesson for civil aviation is profound. Human standards do not inevitably decline; they decline when organizations fail to measure them, fail to recognize weak signals, or tolerate degraded performance because the mission is still being completed. The most dangerous sentence in aviation remains some variation of, “We have been doing it this way and nothing has happened.”
</p>

<p>
The Potomac River collision of January 29, 2025, is therefore valuable precisely because the final investigation does not support the simplistic story that one bad controller or one incompetent pilot killed 67 people. The NTSB concluded in January 2026 that systemic failures involving FAA helicopter-route design, inadequate review of available safety data, failure to act on previous recommendations, overreliance on visual separation, and deficiencies in Army safety monitoring contributed to the collision. The NTSB also determined that the DCA tower was below target staffing but had sufficient personnel available that evening to staff the helicopter and local-control positions separately; the decision to combine positions was not caused by insufficient staffing, and controller fatigue was not identified as causal. That distinction is essential to an article about declining standards: evidence must be allowed to destroy a convenient accusation. The March 22, 2026, LaGuardia collision between Air Canada Express flight 8646 and an airport rescue vehicle is equally sobering but must be treated differently because the investigation remains ongoing. Two pilots died and dozens were injured, but no responsible researcher can presently convert that tragedy into proof of controller, ARFF, airport-management, or flight-crew incompetence. Muecklich et al. (2023), however, show why the event belongs within the broader inquiry: their examination of 87 ground-operation accidents and incidents found situational-awareness deficiencies and failures to follow procedures among prominent human-factor themes. The proper use of LaGuardia is therefore not to prejudge blame; it is to ask why modern airport surface operations remain capable of producing catastrophic conflicts despite surveillance, radios, procedures, training, lighting, and decades of runway-safety work.
</p>

<p>
The deeper problem lies in institutional culture, because individual proficiency exists inside organizations that teach people what deviations will actually be tolerated. Teperi et al. (2023) found that mature human-factors practice becomes most effective when it evolves from isolated compliance activities into an organization-wide mindset embedded in management, supervision, work planning, and daily operations. Pratama and Caponecchia (2025), reviewing aviation safety across national cultures, likewise found that communication, teamwork, decision-making, power distance, individualism, and uncertainty avoidance can shape safety performance in ways that cannot be captured by technical qualification alone. Taken together, these findings expose the weakness of reducing professional standards to certificates and checkrides. A pilot may satisfy a recurrent check yet work in a company where schedule pressure subtly punishes conservative decisions. A controller may be fully certified yet operate in a facility where routinely combined positions have become normal. A mechanic may hold every required authorization yet learn that stopping a departure over an ambiguous discrepancy attracts more management scrutiny than signing it off. A military crew may meet published proficiency requirements while losing exposure to demanding scenarios because flying hours are scarce. In each case the formal standard remains intact while the practical standard quietly moves. That is how a high-reliability organization can become a high-risk organization without ever announcing the transition. The corrosion is incremental, administratively defensible, and usually invisible until an accident investigation reconstructs years of decisions that each looked individually reasonable.
</p>

<p>
Manufacturers are not ignoring this problem, although their response is understandably framed as training modernization rather than remediation of declining humanity. Airbus has incorporated competency-based training and assessment into ab initio programs and Evidence-Based Training into recurrent instruction, emphasizing technical and nontechnical competencies rather than mere completion of prescribed maneuvers. Boeing likewise identifies competency-based training as the foundation of its workforce-training strategy and expects artificial intelligence, machine learning, mixed reality, and digital learning systems to play increasingly important roles as the industry absorbs enormous numbers of new personnel. These developments are significant because they represent a shift from asking whether a trainee completed a syllabus to asking whether the trainee demonstrated durable competence. Chan et al. (2025) make that distinction particularly relevant by demonstrating that training histories can produce persistent differences in safety perception even after pilots enter common operational environments. Ebbatson et al. (2010) provide the complementary warning that competence itself can decay when it is not exercised. The future training system therefore cannot be merely faster because the workforce shortage is large; it must become more diagnostic. Simulator telemetry, eye tracking, adaptive scenarios, AI-generated variability, individualized remediation, maintenance augmented reality, and competency analytics could allow instructors to identify weaknesses that a fixed sequence of exercises misses. Technology can help replace scarce instructional capacity, but it cannot be allowed to become a mechanism for manufacturing credentials faster. If the industry uses AI to accelerate people through training rather than to deepen their competence, it will have automated precisely the wrong part of the problem.
</p>

<p>
The military and DARPA are already exploring the next stage, although not because either organization publicly describes its mission as compensating for declining pilot quality. DARPA’s Air Combat Evolution program used the X-62A VISTA to develop trusted human–machine collaboration in combat aviation, explicitly studying how pilots calibrate trust in autonomous systems while authority shifts between human and machine. The project is crucial to this discussion because it suggests where the erosion of the human safety margin may eventually lead: not to removal of professional standards, but to machine systems that monitor, cross-check, advise, and assume selected functions when human workload or capability becomes the limiting factor. DARPA’s work is therefore adjacent to the problem rather than evidence that the Pentagon has concluded its aviators are becoming inferior. Likewise, there is no documented public program as of August 31, 2026, showing Elon Musk, Tesla, xAI, or SpaceX directly addressing pilot, controller, mechanic, or aviation-workforce proficiency. Musk’s companies are technologically relevant to autonomy and AI, but attaching his name to this human-performance problem without evidence would make the paper more fashionable and less accurate. The documented actors are less glamorous and more important: FAA workforce planners, NTSB investigators, military safety organizations, aircraft manufacturers, airlines, universities, training providers, unions, airport operators, and human-factors researchers. The approaching question is not whether AI will “save” bad humans. It is whether aviation will use increasingly powerful machine intelligence to preserve human excellence—or use it as an excuse to tolerate less of it.
</p>

<p>
Federal, state, county, and local governments occupy different but overlapping parts of this equation. The FAA establishes and enforces the principal federal certification framework for pilots, mechanics, controllers, carriers, and certificated airports, while the NTSB investigates accidents and issues recommendations but does not regulate. State, county, municipal, and public-authority airport owners nevertheless control important parts of the operational environment: airport staffing, rescue and firefighting, snow and ice operations, wildlife mitigation, vehicle control, construction, surface inspections, emergency planning, and increasingly airport SMS. Under 14 C.F.R. Part 139, airport operators—including cities and counties—must satisfy federal requirements governing runway safety, markings, lighting, ARFF, fueling, emergency response, and other functions; the FAA notes that roughly 520 U.S. airports currently operate under Part 139 certification. LaGuardia illustrates the shared-governance problem neatly: the airport is owned by New York City and operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, while federal authorities regulate significant aspects of aviation safety and the NTSB investigates the 2026 runway collision. The legal consequences of declining standards can therefore spread rapidly. Airlines and maintenance organizations face negligent hiring, training, supervision, retention, and operational-control allegations; manufacturers may face design or failure-to-warn claims; airport operators may face liability arising from surface operations and emergency response; governments may encounter statutory and sovereign-immunity questions; and individual professionals can face certificate action or criminal exposure in exceptional cases. Civil litigation also has a powerful discovery function: training records, staffing rosters, fatigue data, safety reports, internal warnings, simulator performance, maintenance communications, and rejected recommendations can transform what management once described as an unforeseeable accident into documented organizational knowledge.
</p>

<p>
Where this is going depends upon whether aviation admits what the evidence actually says. There is no credible basis for declaring that an entire generation of aviation professionals is incompetent, and the Army’s recent safety improvement is an important counterexample to any such lazy conclusion. There is, however, substantial evidence that aviation is entering a dangerous transition in which extraordinary numbers of experienced people must be replaced while operational complexity, automation, traffic density, maintenance sophistication, military mission demands, and organizational interdependence continue to increase. The human safety margin can disappear even while every person involved technically meets the minimum standard. It disappears when “qualified” quietly substitutes for experienced, when recurrent training becomes an administrative event, when automation starves professionals of meaningful practice, when supervisors are too thinly spread to mentor newcomers, when fatigue is scheduled instead of managed, when deviations become normal because they worked yesterday, and when technology is expected to compensate for institutional decisions that technology did not cause. Aviation’s response must therefore be almost ruthlessly conservative about competence: more meaningful training rather than merely more training throughput; deliberate preservation of manual and cognitive proficiency; protected mentorship; data-driven identification of weak skills; stronger maintenance reporting cultures; scientifically managed controller fatigue; recurrent exposure to compound failures; aggressive military lessons-learned systems; and technological assistance designed to reinforce rather than replace professional mastery. The tragedy would not be that artificial intelligence becomes better than humans at parts of aviation. The tragedy would be that humans deliberately allow their own safety margin to erode because the machines appear capable of catching them. If AI eventually becomes aviation’s knight in shining armor, it should be because it adds another layer to an already excellent human system—not because we dismantled the human system and then begged the machine to save what remained.
</p>

<h3 style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">References</h3>

<p>
Aktas, E., & Kagnicioglu, C. H. (2023). Factors affecting safety behaviors of aircraft maintenance technicians: A study on Civil Aviation Industry in Turkey. <i>Safety Science, 164</i>, 106146. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2023.106146
</p>

<p>
Chan, W. T.-K., Li, W.-C., & Braithwaite, G. (2025). Pilots’ training backgrounds affecting the attribution of event causal factors and airline safety management. <i>Journal of Air Transport Management, 125</i>, 102786. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jairtraman.2025.102786
</p>

<p>
Ebbatson, M., Harris, D., Huddlestone, J., & Sears, R. (2010). The relationship between manual handling performance and recent flying experience in air transport pilots. <i>Ergonomics, 53</i>(2), 268–277. https://doi.org/10.1080/00140130903342349
</p>

<p>
Kelly, D., & Efthymiou, M. (2019). An analysis of human factors in fifty controlled flight into terrain aviation accidents from 2007 to 2017. <i>Journal of Safety Research, 69</i>, 155–165. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2019.03.009
</p>

<p>
Li, W.-C., & Harris, D. (2013). Identifying training deficiencies in military pilots by applying the Human Factors Analysis and Classification System. <i>International Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics, 19</i>(1), 3–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/10803548.2013.11076962
</p>

<p>
Li, W.-C., Zhang, J., & Kearney, P. (2023). Psychophysiological coherence training to moderate air traffic controllers’ fatigue on rotating roster. <i>Risk Analysis, 43</i>(2), 391–404. https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13899
</p>

<p>
Muecklich, N., Sikora, I., Paraskevas, A., & Padhra, A. (2023). The role of human factors in aviation ground operation-related accidents/incidents: A human error analysis approach. <i>Transportation Engineering, 13</i>, 100184. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.treng.2023.100184
</p>

<p>
Pratama, G. B., & Caponecchia, C. (2025). Examining the influence of national culture on aviation safety: A systematic review. <i>Journal of Safety Research, 92</i>, 317–330. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2024.11.020
</p>

<p>
Sedlar, N., Irwin, A., Martin, D., & Roberts, R. (2023). A qualitative systematic review on the application of the normalization of deviance phenomenon within high-risk industries. <i>Journal of Safety Research, 84</i>, 290–305. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2022.11.005
</p>

<p>
Teperi, A.-M., Paajanen, T., Asikainen, I., & Lantto, E. (2023). From must to mindset: Outcomes of human factor practices in aviation and railway companies. <i>Safety Science, 158</i>, 105968. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2022.105968
</p>

<p>
Tyagi, A., Tripathi, R., & Bouarfa, S. (2023). Learning from past in the aircraft maintenance industry: An empirical evaluation in the safety management framework. <i>Heliyon, 9</i>(11), e21620. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e21620
</p>

<p>
Zamarreño Suárez, M., Arnaldo Valdés, R. M., Pérez Moreno, F., Delgado-Aguilera Jurado, R., López de Frutos, P. M., & Gómez Comendador, V. F. (2024). Understanding the research on air traffic controller workload and its implications for safety: A science mapping-based analysis. <i>Safety Science, 176</i>, 106545. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2024.106545
</p>

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<h2 style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif; text-align:center; margin-top:0;">The Erosion of the Human Safety Margin</h2>

<p style="text-align:center;">
Albert N. Clark<br>
Independent Author<br>
Published: August 31, 2026<br>
ASX Research Journal and Database<br>
ISSN 3068-3351 (Online)<br>
Place of Publication: Cadiz City, Philippines<br>
Publisher: ASXResearch.org
</p>

<h3 style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Author Note</h3>

<p>
Albert N. Clark<br>
Department of Aerospace Sciences, ASXResearch.org<br>
ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-7348-4395<br>
The author reports no conflicts of interest.<br>
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Albert N. Clark, Email: aclark@asxresearch.org
</p>

<h3 style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif; text-align:center;">Abstract</h3>

<p>
This article examines whether aviation’s human safety margin is being systematically eroded by experience loss, staffing shortages, compressed training pipelines, automation dependence, fatigue, weakened supervision, and the normalization of degraded operating conditions. Rather than arguing that modern aviation professionals are inherently less capable than previous generations, the analysis focuses on the institutional and operational conditions that shape proficiency among pilots, air traffic controllers, maintenance technicians, military aviators, and other frontline personnel. Historical development, contemporary accident and incident evidence, workforce pressures, training trends, military safety experience, regulatory oversight, and organizational culture are evaluated alongside emerging responses from manufacturers, government agencies, and advanced technology programs. The article argues that aviation faces a dangerous transition in which qualification may increasingly be mistaken for experience and automation may be used to compensate for weakened human resilience instead of reinforcing it. The central conclusion is that artificial intelligence and advanced automation should strengthen an already competent human system rather than become substitutes for declining training depth, mentorship, judgment, and professional standards.
</p>

<p><i>Keywords:</i> aviation safety, human performance, professional standards</p>

<h3 style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif; text-align:center;">The Erosion of the Human Safety Margin</h3>

<p>
Commercial aviation has been quietly moving toward the single-pilot question for decades, long before artificial intelligence made the idea sound technologically fashionable.
</p>

<p>
The proposition that aviation’s human element is deteriorating deserves to be treated neither as nostalgia nor as a foregone conclusion. The evidence does not support the crude assertion that today’s pilots, controllers, mechanics, military aviators, dispatchers, firefighters, and ground personnel are simply less intelligent or less conscientious than their predecessors. It does, however, support a more disturbing diagnosis: in important portions of the aviation system, experienced people are retiring faster than institutional knowledge can be replaced; increasingly junior workforces are being asked to absorb sophisticated responsibilities quickly; staffing shortages and production pressures compress training and supervision; automation reduces opportunities to practice perishable skills; fatigue and workload remain stubbornly resistant to administrative solutions; and organizations can gradually become accustomed to operating closer to the edge because yesterday’s shortcut did not produce an accident. Sedlar et al. (2023) describe normalization of deviance as the gradual acceptance of departures from established standards after repeated exposure to those departures without an adverse consequence. That mechanism is a far more useful explanation than generational contempt. The erosion of the human safety margin is therefore not necessarily a decline in humanity’s biological capability; it is frequently the foreseeable product of deliberate decisions about staffing, scheduling, training, experience, cost, automation, organizational tolerance, and how much resilience may be removed before anybody notices. Aviation is extraordinarily safe precisely because generations before us built layers of human redundancy into it. The danger begins when those layers are quietly treated as excess capacity rather than safety infrastructure.
</p>

<p><b>Figure 1</b><br>
<i>The Erosion of the Human Safety Margin: Pressures, Warning Signs, and the Path Toward Recovery in Modern Aviation</i><br>
Note. Click image for full-size image or click here.</p>

<p>
Historically, aviation learned professional competence through blood. Early pilots possessed enormous manual skill but operated in a system with primitive navigation, weak weather forecasting, little standardization, minimal human-factors knowledge, and almost no institutional protection against poor judgment. As technology improved, aviation progressively professionalized the human side as well: instrument standards, recurrent checking, type ratings, maintenance certification, formal air traffic control, crew resource management, military standardization, dispatch systems, accident investigation, and eventually Safety Management Systems. That progression matters because modern safety was never produced by better airplanes alone; it resulted from increasingly disciplined people operating inside increasingly disciplined organizations. Kelly and Efthymiou (2019), examining 50 controlled-flight-into-terrain accidents across commercial, military, and general aviation, found recurring decision errors, skill-based errors, communication deficiencies, planning problems, distraction, complacency, and fatigue despite decades of technological advancement. The implication is uncomfortable: technology can eliminate old failure modes while leaving human vulnerability perfectly capable of creating new ones. The historic answer was recurrent proficiency, supervision, standardization, and layered defense. When those defenses are weakened, the system can regress without the aircraft themselves becoming any less sophisticated. This is especially important in military aviation, where Li and Harris (2013) analyzed 523 military aircraft accidents and identified judgment and decision-making deficiencies along with systemic training weaknesses. Their findings reject the convenient fiction that an accident attributed to “pilot error” begins and ends with the person holding the controls. A deficient pilot can be an individual problem; a pattern of deficient pilots is an organizational product.
</p>

<p>
Commercial flight operations illustrate the paradox particularly well. Airlines increasingly recruit through heterogeneous pipelines—traditional civilian time-building, sponsored cadet programs, military transition, university programs, and accelerated pathways—while simultaneously operating aircraft whose automation makes routine line flying extraordinarily stable. Chan et al. (2025) found that pilots’ initial training backgrounds produce persistent differences in how they perceive and attribute accident causal factors, including how readily they identify latent organizational conditions. That does not make one pipeline inherently unsafe, but it does demonstrate that equivalent licenses do not create identical professional perspectives. Meanwhile, proficiency itself is perishable. Ebbatson et al. (2010) found significant relationships between recent manual-flying experience and transport-pilot manual-control performance, confirming that automation can preserve operational efficiency while reducing opportunities to exercise skills that suddenly become crucial when automation degrades. This creates the possibility of a highly credentialed pilot who is superbly competent at managing the normal automated system but less practiced at recovering when that system ceases behaving normally. The appropriate response is not romantic advocacy for hand-flying every transport leg; it is evidence-based recurrent training deliberately designed around improbable, compound, automation-degraded situations. The workforce pressure intensifies the problem. Boeing’s 2026 Pilot and Technician Outlook projects a global requirement for roughly 674,000 new commercial pilots and 728,000 new maintenance technicians over the next twenty years. Boeing’s 2025 outlook explicitly described a period of workforce “juniority” and stressed competency-based training, digital technologies, mixed reality, artificial intelligence, and machine learning as methods for increasing training effectiveness. When an industry must replace that many experienced professionals while simultaneously expanding, experience compression ceases to be an anecdote and becomes a strategic safety problem.
</p>

<p>
Air traffic control may be the clearest demonstration that competence cannot be separated from the environment in which competent people are required to perform. Zamarreño Suárez et al. (2024), reviewing 374 studies of controller workload, concluded that workload management, assessment, prediction, complexity, and human-centered operational conditions remain fundamental to air-traffic safety. Li et al. (2023) demonstrated that rotating rosters produce accumulated controller fatigue capable of degrading cognitive performance and showed that scientifically designed fatigue interventions can improve resilience. These are not accusations that controllers are becoming careless; they demonstrate that highly trained professionals remain biological organisms whose performance can be degraded by staffing patterns and scheduling. The FAA itself acknowledges a longstanding staffing problem. Its 2026–2028 Controller Workforce Plan reports that 2,028 trainees were hired during FY2025 while 1,460 people were lost through Academy attrition, training failures, retirement, resignation, promotion, and other separation, yielding a net workforce gain of 568; the agency plans progressively larger hiring classes through FY2028. That hiring surge is necessary, but hiring is not synonymous with certification, and certification is not synonymous with seasoned judgment. Every accelerated pipeline creates an unavoidable interval during which veterans are disproportionately responsible for training newcomers while simultaneously operating the system. The real safety question therefore is not whether standards have formally been lowered; it is whether the operational environment provides enough time, mentorship, staffing, recovery, and repetition for new controllers to attain the practical depth that experienced controllers once accumulated under different workforce conditions.
</p>

<p>
Aircraft maintenance presents the same phenomenon in a less visible form. Maintenance failures rarely appear before the public as dramatic evidence of a deteriorating workforce; they are buried in inspection findings, repeat discrepancies, paperwork, deferred defects, installation errors, communication failures, and organizational pressures until one eventually survives every barrier. Aktas and Kagnicioglu (2023) found that maintenance technicians’ safety behavior is strongly influenced by safety leadership and safety climate, and that technicians can be less willing to report unsafe conditions involving their own teams. That finding is important because competence without reporting courage is an incomplete safety defense. Tyagi et al. (2023) similarly found that learning from past maintenance events depends critically on safety communication and on organizations contextualizing and evaluating lessons rather than merely possessing accident information. In other words, a maintenance organization can technically “know” about a previous failure and still fail to learn from it. The coming manpower problem makes that vulnerability harder to dismiss. Boeing’s forecast of hundreds of thousands of new technicians implies a huge transfer of tacit knowledge from retiring mechanics and inspectors to a younger workforce just as fleets, avionics, composites, software, engines, and maintenance analytics become more complex. The danger is not young mechanics; it is an industrial system tempted to treat certification as a substitute for mentorship and throughput as a substitute for craftsmanship. A mechanic who knows which manual paragraph applies is necessary. A mechanic who has seen a subtle defect before, recognizes when the paperwork does not make sense, stops a job under schedule pressure, and can explain why something merely “looks wrong” represents a different level of safety capability. That knowledge is expensive to build and very easy to lose.
</p>

<p>
Military aviation deserves special scrutiny because the hypothesis of universal decline encounters both supporting and contradictory evidence there. Li and Harris’s earlier findings demonstrate that training deficiencies and poor tactical decision-making can become systemic military accident factors, but current U.S. Army data show why careless generalization would be scientifically dishonest. Army Aviation reported five Class A flight mishaps in FY2025 compared with fifteen in FY2024, producing a manned Class A flight mishap rate of 0.66 per 100,000 flying hours—described by the Army as the third-best rate in its recorded history. More revealingly, the Army specifically attributed part of the improvement to closing a training gap involving unanticipated right yaw and loss-of-tail-rotor-effectiveness events that had emerged in FY2023 and FY2024. That sequence is almost a laboratory demonstration of the argument advanced in this paper: proficiency can erode, the erosion can manifest operationally, and a competent institution can identify the deficiency, restore training, and improve the outcome. Military aviation therefore should not be portrayed simply as another decaying institution. It is better understood as an environment where operational tempo, personnel turnover, complex aircraft, combat priorities, and training-resource constraints can expose proficiency gaps quickly—and where aggressive standardization can sometimes repair them just as quickly. The lesson for civil aviation is profound. Human standards do not inevitably decline; they decline when organizations fail to measure them, fail to recognize weak signals, or tolerate degraded performance because the mission is still being completed. The most dangerous sentence in aviation remains some variation of, “We have been doing it this way and nothing has happened.”
</p>

<p>
The Potomac River collision of January 29, 2025, is therefore valuable precisely because the final investigation does not support the simplistic story that one bad controller or one incompetent pilot killed 67 people. The NTSB concluded in January 2026 that systemic failures involving FAA helicopter-route design, inadequate review of available safety data, failure to act on previous recommendations, overreliance on visual separation, and deficiencies in Army safety monitoring contributed to the collision. The NTSB also determined that the DCA tower was below target staffing but had sufficient personnel available that evening to staff the helicopter and local-control positions separately; the decision to combine positions was not caused by insufficient staffing, and controller fatigue was not identified as causal. That distinction is essential to an article about declining standards: evidence must be allowed to destroy a convenient accusation. The March 22, 2026, LaGuardia collision between Air Canada Express flight 8646 and an airport rescue vehicle is equally sobering but must be treated differently because the investigation remains ongoing. Two pilots died and dozens were injured, but no responsible researcher can presently convert that tragedy into proof of controller, ARFF, airport-management, or flight-crew incompetence. Muecklich et al. (2023), however, show why the event belongs within the broader inquiry: their examination of 87 ground-operation accidents and incidents found situational-awareness deficiencies and failures to follow procedures among prominent human-factor themes. The proper use of LaGuardia is therefore not to prejudge blame; it is to ask why modern airport surface operations remain capable of producing catastrophic conflicts despite surveillance, radios, procedures, training, lighting, and decades of runway-safety work.
</p>

<p>
The deeper problem lies in institutional culture, because individual proficiency exists inside organizations that teach people what deviations will actually be tolerated. Teperi et al. (2023) found that mature human-factors practice becomes most effective when it evolves from isolated compliance activities into an organization-wide mindset embedded in management, supervision, work planning, and daily operations. Pratama and Caponecchia (2025), reviewing aviation safety across national cultures, likewise found that communication, teamwork, decision-making, power distance, individualism, and uncertainty avoidance can shape safety performance in ways that cannot be captured by technical qualification alone. Taken together, these findings expose the weakness of reducing professional standards to certificates and checkrides. A pilot may satisfy a recurrent check yet work in a company where schedule pressure subtly punishes conservative decisions. A controller may be fully certified yet operate in a facility where routinely combined positions have become normal. A mechanic may hold every required authorization yet learn that stopping a departure over an ambiguous discrepancy attracts more management scrutiny than signing it off. A military crew may meet published proficiency requirements while losing exposure to demanding scenarios because flying hours are scarce. In each case the formal standard remains intact while the practical standard quietly moves. That is how a high-reliability organization can become a high-risk organization without ever announcing the transition. The corrosion is incremental, administratively defensible, and usually invisible until an accident investigation reconstructs years of decisions that each looked individually reasonable.
</p>

<p>
Manufacturers are not ignoring this problem, although their response is understandably framed as training modernization rather than remediation of declining humanity. Airbus has incorporated competency-based training and assessment into ab initio programs and Evidence-Based Training into recurrent instruction, emphasizing technical and nontechnical competencies rather than mere completion of prescribed maneuvers. Boeing likewise identifies competency-based training as the foundation of its workforce-training strategy and expects artificial intelligence, machine learning, mixed reality, and digital learning systems to play increasingly important roles as the industry absorbs enormous numbers of new personnel. These developments are significant because they represent a shift from asking whether a trainee completed a syllabus to asking whether the trainee demonstrated durable competence. Chan et al. (2025) make that distinction particularly relevant by demonstrating that training histories can produce persistent differences in safety perception even after pilots enter common operational environments. Ebbatson et al. (2010) provide the complementary warning that competence itself can decay when it is not exercised. The future training system therefore cannot be merely faster because the workforce shortage is large; it must become more diagnostic. Simulator telemetry, eye tracking, adaptive scenarios, AI-generated variability, individualized remediation, maintenance augmented reality, and competency analytics could allow instructors to identify weaknesses that a fixed sequence of exercises misses. Technology can help replace scarce instructional capacity, but it cannot be allowed to become a mechanism for manufacturing credentials faster. If the industry uses AI to accelerate people through training rather than to deepen their competence, it will have automated precisely the wrong part of the problem.
</p>

<p>
The military and DARPA are already exploring the next stage, although not because either organization publicly describes its mission as compensating for declining pilot quality. DARPA’s Air Combat Evolution program used the X-62A VISTA to develop trusted human–machine collaboration in combat aviation, explicitly studying how pilots calibrate trust in autonomous systems while authority shifts between human and machine. The project is crucial to this discussion because it suggests where the erosion of the human safety margin may eventually lead: not to removal of professional standards, but to machine systems that monitor, cross-check, advise, and assume selected functions when human workload or capability becomes the limiting factor. DARPA’s work is therefore adjacent to the problem rather than evidence that the Pentagon has concluded its aviators are becoming inferior. Likewise, there is no documented public program as of August 31, 2026, showing Elon Musk, Tesla, xAI, or SpaceX directly addressing pilot, controller, mechanic, or aviation-workforce proficiency. Musk’s companies are technologically relevant to autonomy and AI, but attaching his name to this human-performance problem without evidence would make the paper more fashionable and less accurate. The documented actors are less glamorous and more important: FAA workforce planners, NTSB investigators, military safety organizations, aircraft manufacturers, airlines, universities, training providers, unions, airport operators, and human-factors researchers. The approaching question is not whether AI will “save” bad humans. It is whether aviation will use increasingly powerful machine intelligence to preserve human excellence—or use it as an excuse to tolerate less of it.
</p>

<p>
Federal, state, county, and local governments occupy different but overlapping parts of this equation. The FAA establishes and enforces the principal federal certification framework for pilots, mechanics, controllers, carriers, and certificated airports, while the NTSB investigates accidents and issues recommendations but does not regulate. State, county, municipal, and public-authority airport owners nevertheless control important parts of the operational environment: airport staffing, rescue and firefighting, snow and ice operations, wildlife mitigation, vehicle control, construction, surface inspections, emergency planning, and increasingly airport SMS. Under 14 C.F.R. Part 139, airport operators—including cities and counties—must satisfy federal requirements governing runway safety, markings, lighting, ARFF, fueling, emergency response, and other functions; the FAA notes that roughly 520 U.S. airports currently operate under Part 139 certification. LaGuardia illustrates the shared-governance problem neatly: the airport is owned by New York City and operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, while federal authorities regulate significant aspects of aviation safety and the NTSB investigates the 2026 runway collision. The legal consequences of declining standards can therefore spread rapidly. Airlines and maintenance organizations face negligent hiring, training, supervision, retention, and operational-control allegations; manufacturers may face design or failure-to-warn claims; airport operators may face liability arising from surface operations and emergency response; governments may encounter statutory and sovereign-immunity questions; and individual professionals can face certificate action or criminal exposure in exceptional cases. Civil litigation also has a powerful discovery function: training records, staffing rosters, fatigue data, safety reports, internal warnings, simulator performance, maintenance communications, and rejected recommendations can transform what management once described as an unforeseeable accident into documented organizational knowledge.
</p>

<p>
Where this is going depends upon whether aviation admits what the evidence actually says. There is no credible basis for declaring that an entire generation of aviation professionals is incompetent, and the Army’s recent safety improvement is an important counterexample to any such lazy conclusion. There is, however, substantial evidence that aviation is entering a dangerous transition in which extraordinary numbers of experienced people must be replaced while operational complexity, automation, traffic density, maintenance sophistication, military mission demands, and organizational interdependence continue to increase. The human safety margin can disappear even while every person involved technically meets the minimum standard. It disappears when “qualified” quietly substitutes for experienced, when recurrent training becomes an administrative event, when automation starves professionals of meaningful practice, when supervisors are too thinly spread to mentor newcomers, when fatigue is scheduled instead of managed, when deviations become normal because they worked yesterday, and when technology is expected to compensate for institutional decisions that technology did not cause. Aviation’s response must therefore be almost ruthlessly conservative about competence: more meaningful training rather than merely more training throughput; deliberate preservation of manual and cognitive proficiency; protected mentorship; data-driven identification of weak skills; stronger maintenance reporting cultures; scientifically managed controller fatigue; recurrent exposure to compound failures; aggressive military lessons-learned systems; and technological assistance designed to reinforce rather than replace professional mastery. The tragedy would not be that artificial intelligence becomes better than humans at parts of aviation. The tragedy would be that humans deliberately allow their own safety margin to erode because the machines appear capable of catching them. If AI eventually becomes aviation’s knight in shining armor, it should be because it adds another layer to an already excellent human system—not because we dismantled the human system and then begged the machine to save what remained.
</p>

<h3 style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">References</h3>

<p>
Aktas, E., & Kagnicioglu, C. H. (2023). Factors affecting safety behaviors of aircraft maintenance technicians: A study on Civil Aviation Industry in Turkey. <i>Safety Science, 164</i>, 106146. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2023.106146
</p>

<p>
Chan, W. T.-K., Li, W.-C., & Braithwaite, G. (2025). Pilots’ training backgrounds affecting the attribution of event causal factors and airline safety management. <i>Journal of Air Transport Management, 125</i>, 102786. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jairtraman.2025.102786
</p>

<p>
Ebbatson, M., Harris, D., Huddlestone, J., & Sears, R. (2010). The relationship between manual handling performance and recent flying experience in air transport pilots. <i>Ergonomics, 53</i>(2), 268–277. https://doi.org/10.1080/00140130903342349
</p>

<p>
Kelly, D., & Efthymiou, M. (2019). An analysis of human factors in fifty controlled flight into terrain aviation accidents from 2007 to 2017. <i>Journal of Safety Research, 69</i>, 155–165. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2019.03.009
</p>

<p>
Li, W.-C., & Harris, D. (2013). Identifying training deficiencies in military pilots by applying the Human Factors Analysis and Classification System. <i>International Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics, 19</i>(1), 3–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/10803548.2013.11076962
</p>

<p>
Li, W.-C., Zhang, J., & Kearney, P. (2023). Psychophysiological coherence training to moderate air traffic controllers’ fatigue on rotating roster. <i>Risk Analysis, 43</i>(2), 391–404. https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13899
</p>

<p>
Muecklich, N., Sikora, I., Paraskevas, A., & Padhra, A. (2023). The role of human factors in aviation ground operation-related accidents/incidents: A human error analysis approach. <i>Transportation Engineering, 13</i>, 100184. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.treng.2023.100184
</p>

<p>
Pratama, G. B., & Caponecchia, C. (2025). Examining the influence of national culture on aviation safety: A systematic review. <i>Journal of Safety Research, 92</i>, 317–330. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2024.11.020
</p>

<p>
Sedlar, N., Irwin, A., Martin, D., & Roberts, R. (2023). A qualitative systematic review on the application of the normalization of deviance phenomenon within high-risk industries. <i>Journal of Safety Research, 84</i>, 290–305. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2022.11.005
</p>

<p>
Teperi, A.-M., Paajanen, T., Asikainen, I., & Lantto, E. (2023). From must to mindset: Outcomes of human factor practices in aviation and railway companies. <i>Safety Science, 158</i>, 105968. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2022.105968
</p>

<p>
Tyagi, A., Tripathi, R., & Bouarfa, S. (2023). Learning from past in the aircraft maintenance industry: An empirical evaluation in the safety management framework. <i>Heliyon, 9</i>(11), e21620. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e21620
</p>

<p>
Zamarreño Suárez, M., Arnaldo Valdés, R. M., Pérez Moreno, F., Delgado-Aguilera Jurado, R., López de Frutos, P. M., & Gómez Comendador, V. F. (2024). Understanding the research on air traffic controller workload and its implications for safety: A science mapping-based analysis. <i>Safety Science, 176</i>, 106545. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2024.106545
</p>

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<h2 style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif; text-align:center; margin-top:0;">The Erosion of the Human Safety Margin</h2>

<p style="text-align:center;">
Albert N. Clark<br>
Independent Author<br>
Published: August 31, 2026<br>
ASX Research Journal and Database<br>
ISSN 3068-3351 (Online)<br>
Place of Publication: Cadiz City, Philippines<br>
Publisher: ASXResearch.org
</p>

<h3 style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Author Note</h3>

<p>
Albert N. Clark<br>
Department of Aerospace Sciences, ASXResearch.org<br>
ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-7348-4395<br>
The author reports no conflicts of interest.<br>
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Albert N. Clark, Email: aclark@asxresearch.org
</p>

<h3 style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif; text-align:center;">Abstract</h3>

<p>
This article examines whether aviation’s human safety margin is being systematically eroded by experience loss, staffing shortages, compressed training pipelines, automation dependence, fatigue, weakened supervision, and the normalization of degraded operating conditions. Rather than arguing that modern aviation professionals are inherently less capable than previous generations, the analysis focuses on the institutional and operational conditions that shape proficiency among pilots, air traffic controllers, maintenance technicians, military aviators, and other frontline personnel. Historical development, contemporary accident and incident evidence, workforce pressures, training trends, military safety experience, regulatory oversight, and organizational culture are evaluated alongside emerging responses from manufacturers, government agencies, and advanced technology programs. The article argues that aviation faces a dangerous transition in which qualification may increasingly be mistaken for experience and automation may be used to compensate for weakened human resilience instead of reinforcing it. The central conclusion is that artificial intelligence and advanced automation should strengthen an already competent human system rather than become substitutes for declining training depth, mentorship, judgment, and professional standards.
</p>

<p><i>Keywords:</i> aviation safety, human performance, professional standards</p>

<h3 style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif; text-align:center;">The Erosion of the Human Safety Margin</h3>

<p>
Commercial aviation has been quietly moving toward the single-pilot question for decades, long before artificial intelligence made the idea sound technologically fashionable.
</p>

<p>
The proposition that aviation’s human element is deteriorating deserves to be treated neither as nostalgia nor as a foregone conclusion. The evidence does not support the crude assertion that today’s pilots, controllers, mechanics, military aviators, dispatchers, firefighters, and ground personnel are simply less intelligent or less conscientious than their predecessors. It does, however, support a more disturbing diagnosis: in important portions of the aviation system, experienced people are retiring faster than institutional knowledge can be replaced; increasingly junior workforces are being asked to absorb sophisticated responsibilities quickly; staffing shortages and production pressures compress training and supervision; automation reduces opportunities to practice perishable skills; fatigue and workload remain stubbornly resistant to administrative solutions; and organizations can gradually become accustomed to operating closer to the edge because yesterday’s shortcut did not produce an accident. Sedlar et al. (2023) describe normalization of deviance as the gradual acceptance of departures from established standards after repeated exposure to those departures without an adverse consequence. That mechanism is a far more useful explanation than generational contempt. The erosion of the human safety margin is therefore not necessarily a decline in humanity’s biological capability; it is frequently the foreseeable product of deliberate decisions about staffing, scheduling, training, experience, cost, automation, organizational tolerance, and how much resilience may be removed before anybody notices. Aviation is extraordinarily safe precisely because generations before us built layers of human redundancy into it. The danger begins when those layers are quietly treated as excess capacity rather than safety infrastructure.
</p>

<p><b>Figure 1</b><br>
<i>The Erosion of the Human Safety Margin: Pressures, Warning Signs, and the Path Toward Recovery in Modern Aviation</i><br>
Note. Click image for full-size image or click here.</p>

<p>
Historically, aviation learned professional competence through blood. Early pilots possessed enormous manual skill but operated in a system with primitive navigation, weak weather forecasting, little standardization, minimal human-factors knowledge, and almost no institutional protection against poor judgment. As technology improved, aviation progressively professionalized the human side as well: instrument standards, recurrent checking, type ratings, maintenance certification, formal air traffic control, crew resource management, military standardization, dispatch systems, accident investigation, and eventually Safety Management Systems. That progression matters because modern safety was never produced by better airplanes alone; it resulted from increasingly disciplined people operating inside increasingly disciplined organizations. Kelly and Efthymiou (2019), examining 50 controlled-flight-into-terrain accidents across commercial, military, and general aviation, found recurring decision errors, skill-based errors, communication deficiencies, planning problems, distraction, complacency, and fatigue despite decades of technological advancement. The implication is uncomfortable: technology can eliminate old failure modes while leaving human vulnerability perfectly capable of creating new ones. The historic answer was recurrent proficiency, supervision, standardization, and layered defense. When those defenses are weakened, the system can regress without the aircraft themselves becoming any less sophisticated. This is especially important in military aviation, where Li and Harris (2013) analyzed 523 military aircraft accidents and identified judgment and decision-making deficiencies along with systemic training weaknesses. Their findings reject the convenient fiction that an accident attributed to “pilot error” begins and ends with the person holding the controls. A deficient pilot can be an individual problem; a pattern of deficient pilots is an organizational product.
</p>

<p>
Commercial flight operations illustrate the paradox particularly well. Airlines increasingly recruit through heterogeneous pipelines—traditional civilian time-building, sponsored cadet programs, military transition, university programs, and accelerated pathways—while simultaneously operating aircraft whose automation makes routine line flying extraordinarily stable. Chan et al. (2025) found that pilots’ initial training backgrounds produce persistent differences in how they perceive and attribute accident causal factors, including how readily they identify latent organizational conditions. That does not make one pipeline inherently unsafe, but it does demonstrate that equivalent licenses do not create identical professional perspectives. Meanwhile, proficiency itself is perishable. Ebbatson et al. (2010) found significant relationships between recent manual-flying experience and transport-pilot manual-control performance, confirming that automation can preserve operational efficiency while reducing opportunities to exercise skills that suddenly become crucial when automation degrades. This creates the possibility of a highly credentialed pilot who is superbly competent at managing the normal automated system but less practiced at recovering when that system ceases behaving normally. The appropriate response is not romantic advocacy for hand-flying every transport leg; it is evidence-based recurrent training deliberately designed around improbable, compound, automation-degraded situations. The workforce pressure intensifies the problem. Boeing’s 2026 Pilot and Technician Outlook projects a global requirement for roughly 674,000 new commercial pilots and 728,000 new maintenance technicians over the next twenty years. Boeing’s 2025 outlook explicitly described a period of workforce “juniority” and stressed competency-based training, digital technologies, mixed reality, artificial intelligence, and machine learning as methods for increasing training effectiveness. When an industry must replace that many experienced professionals while simultaneously expanding, experience compression ceases to be an anecdote and becomes a strategic safety problem.
</p>

<p>
Air traffic control may be the clearest demonstration that competence cannot be separated from the environment in which competent people are required to perform. Zamarreño Suárez et al. (2024), reviewing 374 studies of controller workload, concluded that workload management, assessment, prediction, complexity, and human-centered operational conditions remain fundamental to air-traffic safety. Li et al. (2023) demonstrated that rotating rosters produce accumulated controller fatigue capable of degrading cognitive performance and showed that scientifically designed fatigue interventions can improve resilience. These are not accusations that controllers are becoming careless; they demonstrate that highly trained professionals remain biological organisms whose performance can be degraded by staffing patterns and scheduling. The FAA itself acknowledges a longstanding staffing problem. Its 2026–2028 Controller Workforce Plan reports that 2,028 trainees were hired during FY2025 while 1,460 people were lost through Academy attrition, training failures, retirement, resignation, promotion, and other separation, yielding a net workforce gain of 568; the agency plans progressively larger hiring classes through FY2028. That hiring surge is necessary, but hiring is not synonymous with certification, and certification is not synonymous with seasoned judgment. Every accelerated pipeline creates an unavoidable interval during which veterans are disproportionately responsible for training newcomers while simultaneously operating the system. The real safety question therefore is not whether standards have formally been lowered; it is whether the operational environment provides enough time, mentorship, staffing, recovery, and repetition for new controllers to attain the practical depth that experienced controllers once accumulated under different workforce conditions.
</p>

<p>
Aircraft maintenance presents the same phenomenon in a less visible form. Maintenance failures rarely appear before the public as dramatic evidence of a deteriorating workforce; they are buried in inspection findings, repeat discrepancies, paperwork, deferred defects, installation errors, communication failures, and organizational pressures until one eventually survives every barrier. Aktas and Kagnicioglu (2023) found that maintenance technicians’ safety behavior is strongly influenced by safety leadership and safety climate, and that technicians can be less willing to report unsafe conditions involving their own teams. That finding is important because competence without reporting courage is an incomplete safety defense. Tyagi et al. (2023) similarly found that learning from past maintenance events depends critically on safety communication and on organizations contextualizing and evaluating lessons rather than merely possessing accident information. In other words, a maintenance organization can technically “know” about a previous failure and still fail to learn from it. The coming manpower problem makes that vulnerability harder to dismiss. Boeing’s forecast of hundreds of thousands of new technicians implies a huge transfer of tacit knowledge from retiring mechanics and inspectors to a younger workforce just as fleets, avionics, composites, software, engines, and maintenance analytics become more complex. The danger is not young mechanics; it is an industrial system tempted to treat certification as a substitute for mentorship and throughput as a substitute for craftsmanship. A mechanic who knows which manual paragraph applies is necessary. A mechanic who has seen a subtle defect before, recognizes when the paperwork does not make sense, stops a job under schedule pressure, and can explain why something merely “looks wrong” represents a different level of safety capability. That knowledge is expensive to build and very easy to lose.
</p>

<p>
Military aviation deserves special scrutiny because the hypothesis of universal decline encounters both supporting and contradictory evidence there. Li and Harris’s earlier findings demonstrate that training deficiencies and poor tactical decision-making can become systemic military accident factors, but current U.S. Army data show why careless generalization would be scientifically dishonest. Army Aviation reported five Class A flight mishaps in FY2025 compared with fifteen in FY2024, producing a manned Class A flight mishap rate of 0.66 per 100,000 flying hours—described by the Army as the third-best rate in its recorded history. More revealingly, the Army specifically attributed part of the improvement to closing a training gap involving unanticipated right yaw and loss-of-tail-rotor-effectiveness events that had emerged in FY2023 and FY2024. That sequence is almost a laboratory demonstration of the argument advanced in this paper: proficiency can erode, the erosion can manifest operationally, and a competent institution can identify the deficiency, restore training, and improve the outcome. Military aviation therefore should not be portrayed simply as another decaying institution. It is better understood as an environment where operational tempo, personnel turnover, complex aircraft, combat priorities, and training-resource constraints can expose proficiency gaps quickly—and where aggressive standardization can sometimes repair them just as quickly. The lesson for civil aviation is profound. Human standards do not inevitably decline; they decline when organizations fail to measure them, fail to recognize weak signals, or tolerate degraded performance because the mission is still being completed. The most dangerous sentence in aviation remains some variation of, “We have been doing it this way and nothing has happened.”
</p>

<p>
The Potomac River collision of January 29, 2025, is therefore valuable precisely because the final investigation does not support the simplistic story that one bad controller or one incompetent pilot killed 67 people. The NTSB concluded in January 2026 that systemic failures involving FAA helicopter-route design, inadequate review of available safety data, failure to act on previous recommendations, overreliance on visual separation, and deficiencies in Army safety monitoring contributed to the collision. The NTSB also determined that the DCA tower was below target staffing but had sufficient personnel available that evening to staff the helicopter and local-control positions separately; the decision to combine positions was not caused by insufficient staffing, and controller fatigue was not identified as causal. That distinction is essential to an article about declining standards: evidence must be allowed to destroy a convenient accusation. The March 22, 2026, LaGuardia collision between Air Canada Express flight 8646 and an airport rescue vehicle is equally sobering but must be treated differently because the investigation remains ongoing. Two pilots died and dozens were injured, but no responsible researcher can presently convert that tragedy into proof of controller, ARFF, airport-management, or flight-crew incompetence. Muecklich et al. (2023), however, show why the event belongs within the broader inquiry: their examination of 87 ground-operation accidents and incidents found situational-awareness deficiencies and failures to follow procedures among prominent human-factor themes. The proper use of LaGuardia is therefore not to prejudge blame; it is to ask why modern airport surface operations remain capable of producing catastrophic conflicts despite surveillance, radios, procedures, training, lighting, and decades of runway-safety work.
</p>

<p>
The deeper problem lies in institutional culture, because individual proficiency exists inside organizations that teach people what deviations will actually be tolerated. Teperi et al. (2023) found that mature human-factors practice becomes most effective when it evolves from isolated compliance activities into an organization-wide mindset embedded in management, supervision, work planning, and daily operations. Pratama and Caponecchia (2025), reviewing aviation safety across national cultures, likewise found that communication, teamwork, decision-making, power distance, individualism, and uncertainty avoidance can shape safety performance in ways that cannot be captured by technical qualification alone. Taken together, these findings expose the weakness of reducing professional standards to certificates and checkrides. A pilot may satisfy a recurrent check yet work in a company where schedule pressure subtly punishes conservative decisions. A controller may be fully certified yet operate in a facility where routinely combined positions have become normal. A mechanic may hold every required authorization yet learn that stopping a departure over an ambiguous discrepancy attracts more management scrutiny than signing it off. A military crew may meet published proficiency requirements while losing exposure to demanding scenarios because flying hours are scarce. In each case the formal standard remains intact while the practical standard quietly moves. That is how a high-reliability organization can become a high-risk organization without ever announcing the transition. The corrosion is incremental, administratively defensible, and usually invisible until an accident investigation reconstructs years of decisions that each looked individually reasonable.
</p>

<p>
Manufacturers are not ignoring this problem, although their response is understandably framed as training modernization rather than remediation of declining humanity. Airbus has incorporated competency-based training and assessment into ab initio programs and Evidence-Based Training into recurrent instruction, emphasizing technical and nontechnical competencies rather than mere completion of prescribed maneuvers. Boeing likewise identifies competency-based training as the foundation of its workforce-training strategy and expects artificial intelligence, machine learning, mixed reality, and digital learning systems to play increasingly important roles as the industry absorbs enormous numbers of new personnel. These developments are significant because they represent a shift from asking whether a trainee completed a syllabus to asking whether the trainee demonstrated durable competence. Chan et al. (2025) make that distinction particularly relevant by demonstrating that training histories can produce persistent differences in safety perception even after pilots enter common operational environments. Ebbatson et al. (2010) provide the complementary warning that competence itself can decay when it is not exercised. The future training system therefore cannot be merely faster because the workforce shortage is large; it must become more diagnostic. Simulator telemetry, eye tracking, adaptive scenarios, AI-generated variability, individualized remediation, maintenance augmented reality, and competency analytics could allow instructors to identify weaknesses that a fixed sequence of exercises misses. Technology can help replace scarce instructional capacity, but it cannot be allowed to become a mechanism for manufacturing credentials faster. If the industry uses AI to accelerate people through training rather than to deepen their competence, it will have automated precisely the wrong part of the problem.
</p>

<p>
The military and DARPA are already exploring the next stage, although not because either organization publicly describes its mission as compensating for declining pilot quality. DARPA’s Air Combat Evolution program used the X-62A VISTA to develop trusted human–machine collaboration in combat aviation, explicitly studying how pilots calibrate trust in autonomous systems while authority shifts between human and machine. The project is crucial to this discussion because it suggests where the erosion of the human safety margin may eventually lead: not to removal of professional standards, but to machine systems that monitor, cross-check, advise, and assume selected functions when human workload or capability becomes the limiting factor. DARPA’s work is therefore adjacent to the problem rather than evidence that the Pentagon has concluded its aviators are becoming inferior. Likewise, there is no documented public program as of August 31, 2026, showing Elon Musk, Tesla, xAI, or SpaceX directly addressing pilot, controller, mechanic, or aviation-workforce proficiency. Musk’s companies are technologically relevant to autonomy and AI, but attaching his name to this human-performance problem without evidence would make the paper more fashionable and less accurate. The documented actors are less glamorous and more important: FAA workforce planners, NTSB investigators, military safety organizations, aircraft manufacturers, airlines, universities, training providers, unions, airport operators, and human-factors researchers. The approaching question is not whether AI will “save” bad humans. It is whether aviation will use increasingly powerful machine intelligence to preserve human excellence—or use it as an excuse to tolerate less of it.
</p>

<p>
Federal, state, county, and local governments occupy different but overlapping parts of this equation. The FAA establishes and enforces the principal federal certification framework for pilots, mechanics, controllers, carriers, and certificated airports, while the NTSB investigates accidents and issues recommendations but does not regulate. State, county, municipal, and public-authority airport owners nevertheless control important parts of the operational environment: airport staffing, rescue and firefighting, snow and ice operations, wildlife mitigation, vehicle control, construction, surface inspections, emergency planning, and increasingly airport SMS. Under 14 C.F.R. Part 139, airport operators—including cities and counties—must satisfy federal requirements governing runway safety, markings, lighting, ARFF, fueling, emergency response, and other functions; the FAA notes that roughly 520 U.S. airports currently operate under Part 139 certification. LaGuardia illustrates the shared-governance problem neatly: the airport is owned by New York City and operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, while federal authorities regulate significant aspects of aviation safety and the NTSB investigates the 2026 runway collision. The legal consequences of declining standards can therefore spread rapidly. Airlines and maintenance organizations face negligent hiring, training, supervision, retention, and operational-control allegations; manufacturers may face design or failure-to-warn claims; airport operators may face liability arising from surface operations and emergency response; governments may encounter statutory and sovereign-immunity questions; and individual professionals can face certificate action or criminal exposure in exceptional cases. Civil litigation also has a powerful discovery function: training records, staffing rosters, fatigue data, safety reports, internal warnings, simulator performance, maintenance communications, and rejected recommendations can transform what management once described as an unforeseeable accident into documented organizational knowledge.
</p>

<p>
Where this is going depends upon whether aviation admits what the evidence actually says. There is no credible basis for declaring that an entire generation of aviation professionals is incompetent, and the Army’s recent safety improvement is an important counterexample to any such lazy conclusion. There is, however, substantial evidence that aviation is entering a dangerous transition in which extraordinary numbers of experienced people must be replaced while operational complexity, automation, traffic density, maintenance sophistication, military mission demands, and organizational interdependence continue to increase. The human safety margin can disappear even while every person involved technically meets the minimum standard. It disappears when “qualified” quietly substitutes for experienced, when recurrent training becomes an administrative event, when automation starves professionals of meaningful practice, when supervisors are too thinly spread to mentor newcomers, when fatigue is scheduled instead of managed, when deviations become normal because they worked yesterday, and when technology is expected to compensate for institutional decisions that technology did not cause. Aviation’s response must therefore be almost ruthlessly conservative about competence: more meaningful training rather than merely more training throughput; deliberate preservation of manual and cognitive proficiency; protected mentorship; data-driven identification of weak skills; stronger maintenance reporting cultures; scientifically managed controller fatigue; recurrent exposure to compound failures; aggressive military lessons-learned systems; and technological assistance designed to reinforce rather than replace professional mastery. The tragedy would not be that artificial intelligence becomes better than humans at parts of aviation. The tragedy would be that humans deliberately allow their own safety margin to erode because the machines appear capable of catching them. If AI eventually becomes aviation’s knight in shining armor, it should be because it adds another layer to an already excellent human system—not because we dismantled the human system and then begged the machine to save what remained.
</p>

<h3 style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">References</h3>

<p>
Aktas, E., & Kagnicioglu, C. H. (2023). Factors affecting safety behaviors of aircraft maintenance technicians: A study on Civil Aviation Industry in Turkey. <i>Safety Science, 164</i>, 106146. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2023.106146
</p>

<p>
Chan, W. T.-K., Li, W.-C., & Braithwaite, G. (2025). Pilots’ training backgrounds affecting the attribution of event causal factors and airline safety management. <i>Journal of Air Transport Management, 125</i>, 102786. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jairtraman.2025.102786
</p>

<p>
Ebbatson, M., Harris, D., Huddlestone, J., & Sears, R. (2010). The relationship between manual handling performance and recent flying experience in air transport pilots. <i>Ergonomics, 53</i>(2), 268–277. https://doi.org/10.1080/00140130903342349
</p>

<p>
Kelly, D., & Efthymiou, M. (2019). An analysis of human factors in fifty controlled flight into terrain aviation accidents from 2007 to 2017. <i>Journal of Safety Research, 69</i>, 155–165. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2019.03.009
</p>

<p>
Li, W.-C., & Harris, D. (2013). Identifying training deficiencies in military pilots by applying the Human Factors Analysis and Classification System. <i>International Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics, 19</i>(1), 3–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/10803548.2013.11076962
</p>

<p>
Li, W.-C., Zhang, J., & Kearney, P. (2023). Psychophysiological coherence training to moderate air traffic controllers’ fatigue on rotating roster. <i>Risk Analysis, 43</i>(2), 391–404. https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13899
</p>

<p>
Muecklich, N., Sikora, I., Paraskevas, A., & Padhra, A. (2023). The role of human factors in aviation ground operation-related accidents/incidents: A human error analysis approach. <i>Transportation Engineering, 13</i>, 100184. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.treng.2023.100184
</p>

<p>
Pratama, G. B., & Caponecchia, C. (2025). Examining the influence of national culture on aviation safety: A systematic review. <i>Journal of Safety Research, 92</i>, 317–330. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2024.11.020
</p>

<p>
Sedlar, N., Irwin, A., Martin, D., & Roberts, R. (2023). A qualitative systematic review on the application of the normalization of deviance phenomenon within high-risk industries. <i>Journal of Safety Research, 84</i>, 290–305. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2022.11.005
</p>

<p>
Teperi, A.-M., Paajanen, T., Asikainen, I., & Lantto, E. (2023). From must to mindset: Outcomes of human factor practices in aviation and railway companies. <i>Safety Science, 158</i>, 105968. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2022.105968
</p>

<p>
Tyagi, A., Tripathi, R., & Bouarfa, S. (2023). Learning from past in the aircraft maintenance industry: An empirical evaluation in the safety management framework. <i>Heliyon, 9</i>(11), e21620. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e21620
</p>

<p>
Zamarreño Suárez, M., Arnaldo Valdés, R. M., Pérez Moreno, F., Delgado-Aguilera Jurado, R., López de Frutos, P. M., & Gómez Comendador, V. F. (2024). Understanding the research on air traffic controller workload and its implications for safety: A science mapping-based analysis. <i>Safety Science, 176</i>, 106545. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2024.106545
</p>

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<h2 style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif; text-align:center; margin-top:0;">The Erosion of the Human Safety Margin</h2>

<p style="text-align:center;">
Albert N. Clark<br>
Independent Author<br>
Published: August 31, 2026<br>
ASX Research Journal and Database<br>
ISSN 3068-3351 (Online)<br>
Place of Publication: Cadiz City, Philippines<br>
Publisher: ASXResearch.org
</p>

<h3 style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">Author Note</h3>

<p>
Albert N. Clark<br>
Department of Aerospace Sciences, ASXResearch.org<br>
ORCID iD: https://orcid.org/0009-0002-7348-4395<br>
The author reports no conflicts of interest.<br>
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Albert N. Clark, Email: aclark@asxresearch.org
</p>

<h3 style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif; text-align:center;">Abstract</h3>

<p>
This article examines whether aviation’s human safety margin is being systematically eroded by experience loss, staffing shortages, compressed training pipelines, automation dependence, fatigue, weakened supervision, and the normalization of degraded operating conditions. Rather than arguing that modern aviation professionals are inherently less capable than previous generations, the analysis focuses on the institutional and operational conditions that shape proficiency among pilots, air traffic controllers, maintenance technicians, military aviators, and other frontline personnel. Historical development, contemporary accident and incident evidence, workforce pressures, training trends, military safety experience, regulatory oversight, and organizational culture are evaluated alongside emerging responses from manufacturers, government agencies, and advanced technology programs. The article argues that aviation faces a dangerous transition in which qualification may increasingly be mistaken for experience and automation may be used to compensate for weakened human resilience instead of reinforcing it. The central conclusion is that artificial intelligence and advanced automation should strengthen an already competent human system rather than become substitutes for declining training depth, mentorship, judgment, and professional standards.
</p>

<p><i>Keywords:</i> aviation safety, human performance, professional standards</p>

<h3 style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif; text-align:center;">The Erosion of the Human Safety Margin</h3>

<p>
Commercial aviation has been quietly moving toward the single-pilot question for decades, long before artificial intelligence made the idea sound technologically fashionable.
</p>

<p>
The proposition that aviation’s human element is deteriorating deserves to be treated neither as nostalgia nor as a foregone conclusion. The evidence does not support the crude assertion that today’s pilots, controllers, mechanics, military aviators, dispatchers, firefighters, and ground personnel are simply less intelligent or less conscientious than their predecessors. It does, however, support a more disturbing diagnosis: in important portions of the aviation system, experienced people are retiring faster than institutional knowledge can be replaced; increasingly junior workforces are being asked to absorb sophisticated responsibilities quickly; staffing shortages and production pressures compress training and supervision; automation reduces opportunities to practice perishable skills; fatigue and workload remain stubbornly resistant to administrative solutions; and organizations can gradually become accustomed to operating closer to the edge because yesterday’s shortcut did not produce an accident. Sedlar et al. (2023) describe normalization of deviance as the gradual acceptance of departures from established standards after repeated exposure to those departures without an adverse consequence. That mechanism is a far more useful explanation than generational contempt. The erosion of the human safety margin is therefore not necessarily a decline in humanity’s biological capability; it is frequently the foreseeable product of deliberate decisions about staffing, scheduling, training, experience, cost, automation, organizational tolerance, and how much resilience may be removed before anybody notices. Aviation is extraordinarily safe precisely because generations before us built layers of human redundancy into it. The danger begins when those layers are quietly treated as excess capacity rather than safety infrastructure.
</p>

<p><b>Figure 1</b><br>
<i>The Erosion of the Human Safety Margin: Pressures, Warning Signs, and the Path Toward Recovery in Modern Aviation</i><br>
Note. Click image for full-size image or click here.</p>

<p>
Historically, aviation learned professional competence through blood. Early pilots possessed enormous manual skill but operated in a system with primitive navigation, weak weather forecasting, little standardization, minimal human-factors knowledge, and almost no institutional protection against poor judgment. As technology improved, aviation progressively professionalized the human side as well: instrument standards, recurrent checking, type ratings, maintenance certification, formal air traffic control, crew resource management, military standardization, dispatch systems, accident investigation, and eventually Safety Management Systems. That progression matters because modern safety was never produced by better airplanes alone; it resulted from increasingly disciplined people operating inside increasingly disciplined organizations. Kelly and Efthymiou (2019), examining 50 controlled-flight-into-terrain accidents across commercial, military, and general aviation, found recurring decision errors, skill-based errors, communication deficiencies, planning problems, distraction, complacency, and fatigue despite decades of technological advancement. The implication is uncomfortable: technology can eliminate old failure modes while leaving human vulnerability perfectly capable of creating new ones. The historic answer was recurrent proficiency, supervision, standardization, and layered defense. When those defenses are weakened, the system can regress without the aircraft themselves becoming any less sophisticated. This is especially important in military aviation, where Li and Harris (2013) analyzed 523 military aircraft accidents and identified judgment and decision-making deficiencies along with systemic training weaknesses. Their findings reject the convenient fiction that an accident attributed to “pilot error” begins and ends with the person holding the controls. A deficient pilot can be an individual problem; a pattern of deficient pilots is an organizational product.
</p>

<p>
Commercial flight operations illustrate the paradox particularly well. Airlines increasingly recruit through heterogeneous pipelines—traditional civilian time-building, sponsored cadet programs, military transition, university programs, and accelerated pathways—while simultaneously operating aircraft whose automation makes routine line flying extraordinarily stable. Chan et al. (2025) found that pilots’ initial training backgrounds produce persistent differences in how they perceive and attribute accident causal factors, including how readily they identify latent organizational conditions. That does not make one pipeline inherently unsafe, but it does demonstrate that equivalent licenses do not create identical professional perspectives. Meanwhile, proficiency itself is perishable. Ebbatson et al. (2010) found significant relationships between recent manual-flying experience and transport-pilot manual-control performance, confirming that automation can preserve operational efficiency while reducing opportunities to exercise skills that suddenly become crucial when automation degrades. This creates the possibility of a highly credentialed pilot who is superbly competent at managing the normal automated system but less practiced at recovering when that system ceases behaving normally. The appropriate response is not romantic advocacy for hand-flying every transport leg; it is evidence-based recurrent training deliberately designed around improbable, compound, automation-degraded situations. The workforce pressure intensifies the problem. Boeing’s 2026 Pilot and Technician Outlook projects a global requirement for roughly 674,000 new commercial pilots and 728,000 new maintenance technicians over the next twenty years. Boeing’s 2025 outlook explicitly described a period of workforce “juniority” and stressed competency-based training, digital technologies, mixed reality, artificial intelligence, and machine learning as methods for increasing training effectiveness. When an industry must replace that many experienced professionals while simultaneously expanding, experience compression ceases to be an anecdote and becomes a strategic safety problem.
</p>

<p>
Air traffic control may be the clearest demonstration that competence cannot be separated from the environment in which competent people are required to perform. Zamarreño Suárez et al. (2024), reviewing 374 studies of controller workload, concluded that workload management, assessment, prediction, complexity, and human-centered operational conditions remain fundamental to air-traffic safety. Li et al. (2023) demonstrated that rotating rosters produce accumulated controller fatigue capable of degrading cognitive performance and showed that scientifically designed fatigue interventions can improve resilience. These are not accusations that controllers are becoming careless; they demonstrate that highly trained professionals remain biological organisms whose performance can be degraded by staffing patterns and scheduling. The FAA itself acknowledges a longstanding staffing problem. Its 2026–2028 Controller Workforce Plan reports that 2,028 trainees were hired during FY2025 while 1,460 people were lost through Academy attrition, training failures, retirement, resignation, promotion, and other separation, yielding a net workforce gain of 568; the agency plans progressively larger hiring classes through FY2028. That hiring surge is necessary, but hiring is not synonymous with certification, and certification is not synonymous with seasoned judgment. Every accelerated pipeline creates an unavoidable interval during which veterans are disproportionately responsible for training newcomers while simultaneously operating the system. The real safety question therefore is not whether standards have formally been lowered; it is whether the operational environment provides enough time, mentorship, staffing, recovery, and repetition for new controllers to attain the practical depth that experienced controllers once accumulated under different workforce conditions.
</p>

<p>
Aircraft maintenance presents the same phenomenon in a less visible form. Maintenance failures rarely appear before the public as dramatic evidence of a deteriorating workforce; they are buried in inspection findings, repeat discrepancies, paperwork, deferred defects, installation errors, communication failures, and organizational pressures until one eventually survives every barrier. Aktas and Kagnicioglu (2023) found that maintenance technicians’ safety behavior is strongly influenced by safety leadership and safety climate, and that technicians can be less willing to report unsafe conditions involving their own teams. That finding is important because competence without reporting courage is an incomplete safety defense. Tyagi et al. (2023) similarly found that learning from past maintenance events depends critically on safety communication and on organizations contextualizing and evaluating lessons rather than merely possessing accident information. In other words, a maintenance organization can technically “know” about a previous failure and still fail to learn from it. The coming manpower problem makes that vulnerability harder to dismiss. Boeing’s forecast of hundreds of thousands of new technicians implies a huge transfer of tacit knowledge from retiring mechanics and inspectors to a younger workforce just as fleets, avionics, composites, software, engines, and maintenance analytics become more complex. The danger is not young mechanics; it is an industrial system tempted to treat certification as a substitute for mentorship and throughput as a substitute for craftsmanship. A mechanic who knows which manual paragraph applies is necessary. A mechanic who has seen a subtle defect before, recognizes when the paperwork does not make sense, stops a job under schedule pressure, and can explain why something merely “looks wrong” represents a different level of safety capability. That knowledge is expensive to build and very easy to lose.
</p>

<p>
Military aviation deserves special scrutiny because the hypothesis of universal decline encounters both supporting and contradictory evidence there. Li and Harris’s earlier findings demonstrate that training deficiencies and poor tactical decision-making can become systemic military accident factors, but current U.S. Army data show why careless generalization would be scientifically dishonest. Army Aviation reported five Class A flight mishaps in FY2025 compared with fifteen in FY2024, producing a manned Class A flight mishap rate of 0.66 per 100,000 flying hours—described by the Army as the third-best rate in its recorded history. More revealingly, the Army specifically attributed part of the improvement to closing a training gap involving unanticipated right yaw and loss-of-tail-rotor-effectiveness events that had emerged in FY2023 and FY2024. That sequence is almost a laboratory demonstration of the argument advanced in this paper: proficiency can erode, the erosion can manifest operationally, and a competent institution can identify the deficiency, restore training, and improve the outcome. Military aviation therefore should not be portrayed simply as another decaying institution. It is better understood as an environment where operational tempo, personnel turnover, complex aircraft, combat priorities, and training-resource constraints can expose proficiency gaps quickly—and where aggressive standardization can sometimes repair them just as quickly. The lesson for civil aviation is profound. Human standards do not inevitably decline; they decline when organizations fail to measure them, fail to recognize weak signals, or tolerate degraded performance because the mission is still being completed. The most dangerous sentence in aviation remains some variation of, “We have been doing it this way and nothing has happened.”
</p>

<p>
The Potomac River collision of January 29, 2025, is therefore valuable precisely because the final investigation does not support the simplistic story that one bad controller or one incompetent pilot killed 67 people. The NTSB concluded in January 2026 that systemic failures involving FAA helicopter-route design, inadequate review of available safety data, failure to act on previous recommendations, overreliance on visual separation, and deficiencies in Army safety monitoring contributed to the collision. The NTSB also determined that the DCA tower was below target staffing but had sufficient personnel available that evening to staff the helicopter and local-control positions separately; the decision to combine positions was not caused by insufficient staffing, and controller fatigue was not identified as causal. That distinction is essential to an article about declining standards: evidence must be allowed to destroy a convenient accusation. The March 22, 2026, LaGuardia collision between Air Canada Express flight 8646 and an airport rescue vehicle is equally sobering but must be treated differently because the investigation remains ongoing. Two pilots died and dozens were injured, but no responsible researcher can presently convert that tragedy into proof of controller, ARFF, airport-management, or flight-crew incompetence. Muecklich et al. (2023), however, show why the event belongs within the broader inquiry: their examination of 87 ground-operation accidents and incidents found situational-awareness deficiencies and failures to follow procedures among prominent human-factor themes. The proper use of LaGuardia is therefore not to prejudge blame; it is to ask why modern airport surface operations remain capable of producing catastrophic conflicts despite surveillance, radios, procedures, training, lighting, and decades of runway-safety work.
</p>

<p>
The deeper problem lies in institutional culture, because individual proficiency exists inside organizations that teach people what deviations will actually be tolerated. Teperi et al. (2023) found that mature human-factors practice becomes most effective when it evolves from isolated compliance activities into an organization-wide mindset embedded in management, supervision, work planning, and daily operations. Pratama and Caponecchia (2025), reviewing aviation safety across national cultures, likewise found that communication, teamwork, decision-making, power distance, individualism, and uncertainty avoidance can shape safety performance in ways that cannot be captured by technical qualification alone. Taken together, these findings expose the weakness of reducing professional standards to certificates and checkrides. A pilot may satisfy a recurrent check yet work in a company where schedule pressure subtly punishes conservative decisions. A controller may be fully certified yet operate in a facility where routinely combined positions have become normal. A mechanic may hold every required authorization yet learn that stopping a departure over an ambiguous discrepancy attracts more management scrutiny than signing it off. A military crew may meet published proficiency requirements while losing exposure to demanding scenarios because flying hours are scarce. In each case the formal standard remains intact while the practical standard quietly moves. That is how a high-reliability organization can become a high-risk organization without ever announcing the transition. The corrosion is incremental, administratively defensible, and usually invisible until an accident investigation reconstructs years of decisions that each looked individually reasonable.
</p>

<p>
Manufacturers are not ignoring this problem, although their response is understandably framed as training modernization rather than remediation of declining humanity. Airbus has incorporated competency-based training and assessment into ab initio programs and Evidence-Based Training into recurrent instruction, emphasizing technical and nontechnical competencies rather than mere completion of prescribed maneuvers. Boeing likewise identifies competency-based training as the foundation of its workforce-training strategy and expects artificial intelligence, machine learning, mixed reality, and digital learning systems to play increasingly important roles as the industry absorbs enormous numbers of new personnel. These developments are significant because they represent a shift from asking whether a trainee completed a syllabus to asking whether the trainee demonstrated durable competence. Chan et al. (2025) make that distinction particularly relevant by demonstrating that training histories can produce persistent differences in safety perception even after pilots enter common operational environments. Ebbatson et al. (2010) provide the complementary warning that competence itself can decay when it is not exercised. The future training system therefore cannot be merely faster because the workforce shortage is large; it must become more diagnostic. Simulator telemetry, eye tracking, adaptive scenarios, AI-generated variability, individualized remediation, maintenance augmented reality, and competency analytics could allow instructors to identify weaknesses that a fixed sequence of exercises misses. Technology can help replace scarce instructional capacity, but it cannot be allowed to become a mechanism for manufacturing credentials faster. If the industry uses AI to accelerate people through training rather than to deepen their competence, it will have automated precisely the wrong part of the problem.
</p>

<p>
The military and DARPA are already exploring the next stage, although not because either organization publicly describes its mission as compensating for declining pilot quality. DARPA’s Air Combat Evolution program used the X-62A VISTA to develop trusted human–machine collaboration in combat aviation, explicitly studying how pilots calibrate trust in autonomous systems while authority shifts between human and machine. The project is crucial to this discussion because it suggests where the erosion of the human safety margin may eventually lead: not to removal of professional standards, but to machine systems that monitor, cross-check, advise, and assume selected functions when human workload or capability becomes the limiting factor. DARPA’s work is therefore adjacent to the problem rather than evidence that the Pentagon has concluded its aviators are becoming inferior. Likewise, there is no documented public program as of August 31, 2026, showing Elon Musk, Tesla, xAI, or SpaceX directly addressing pilot, controller, mechanic, or aviation-workforce proficiency. Musk’s companies are technologically relevant to autonomy and AI, but attaching his name to this human-performance problem without evidence would make the paper more fashionable and less accurate. The documented actors are less glamorous and more important: FAA workforce planners, NTSB investigators, military safety organizations, aircraft manufacturers, airlines, universities, training providers, unions, airport operators, and human-factors researchers. The approaching question is not whether AI will “save” bad humans. It is whether aviation will use increasingly powerful machine intelligence to preserve human excellence—or use it as an excuse to tolerate less of it.
</p>

<p>
Federal, state, county, and local governments occupy different but overlapping parts of this equation. The FAA establishes and enforces the principal federal certification framework for pilots, mechanics, controllers, carriers, and certificated airports, while the NTSB investigates accidents and issues recommendations but does not regulate. State, county, municipal, and public-authority airport owners nevertheless control important parts of the operational environment: airport staffing, rescue and firefighting, snow and ice operations, wildlife mitigation, vehicle control, construction, surface inspections, emergency planning, and increasingly airport SMS. Under 14 C.F.R. Part 139, airport operators—including cities and counties—must satisfy federal requirements governing runway safety, markings, lighting, ARFF, fueling, emergency response, and other functions; the FAA notes that roughly 520 U.S. airports currently operate under Part 139 certification. LaGuardia illustrates the shared-governance problem neatly: the airport is owned by New York City and operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, while federal authorities regulate significant aspects of aviation safety and the NTSB investigates the 2026 runway collision. The legal consequences of declining standards can therefore spread rapidly. Airlines and maintenance organizations face negligent hiring, training, supervision, retention, and operational-control allegations; manufacturers may face design or failure-to-warn claims; airport operators may face liability arising from surface operations and emergency response; governments may encounter statutory and sovereign-immunity questions; and individual professionals can face certificate action or criminal exposure in exceptional cases. Civil litigation also has a powerful discovery function: training records, staffing rosters, fatigue data, safety reports, internal warnings, simulator performance, maintenance communications, and rejected recommendations can transform what management once described as an unforeseeable accident into documented organizational knowledge.
</p>

<p>
Where this is going depends upon whether aviation admits what the evidence actually says. There is no credible basis for declaring that an entire generation of aviation professionals is incompetent, and the Army’s recent safety improvement is an important counterexample to any such lazy conclusion. There is, however, substantial evidence that aviation is entering a dangerous transition in which extraordinary numbers of experienced people must be replaced while operational complexity, automation, traffic density, maintenance sophistication, military mission demands, and organizational interdependence continue to increase. The human safety margin can disappear even while every person involved technically meets the minimum standard. It disappears when “qualified” quietly substitutes for experienced, when recurrent training becomes an administrative event, when automation starves professionals of meaningful practice, when supervisors are too thinly spread to mentor newcomers, when fatigue is scheduled instead of managed, when deviations become normal because they worked yesterday, and when technology is expected to compensate for institutional decisions that technology did not cause. Aviation’s response must therefore be almost ruthlessly conservative about competence: more meaningful training rather than merely more training throughput; deliberate preservation of manual and cognitive proficiency; protected mentorship; data-driven identification of weak skills; stronger maintenance reporting cultures; scientifically managed controller fatigue; recurrent exposure to compound failures; aggressive military lessons-learned systems; and technological assistance designed to reinforce rather than replace professional mastery. The tragedy would not be that artificial intelligence becomes better than humans at parts of aviation. The tragedy would be that humans deliberately allow their own safety margin to erode because the machines appear capable of catching them. If AI eventually becomes aviation’s knight in shining armor, it should be because it adds another layer to an already excellent human system—not because we dismantled the human system and then begged the machine to save what remained.
</p>

<h3 style="font-family:Arial,sans-serif;">References</h3>

<p>
Aktas, E., & Kagnicioglu, C. H. (2023). Factors affecting safety behaviors of aircraft maintenance technicians: A study on Civil Aviation Industry in Turkey. <i>Safety Science, 164</i>, 106146. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2023.106146
</p>

<p>
Chan, W. T.-K., Li, W.-C., & Braithwaite, G. (2025). Pilots’ training backgrounds affecting the attribution of event causal factors and airline safety management. <i>Journal of Air Transport Management, 125</i>, 102786. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jairtraman.2025.102786
</p>

<p>
Ebbatson, M., Harris, D., Huddlestone, J., & Sears, R. (2010). The relationship between manual handling performance and recent flying experience in air transport pilots. <i>Ergonomics, 53</i>(2), 268–277. https://doi.org/10.1080/00140130903342349
</p>

<p>
Kelly, D., & Efthymiou, M. (2019). An analysis of human factors in fifty controlled flight into terrain aviation accidents from 2007 to 2017. <i>Journal of Safety Research, 69</i>, 155–165. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2019.03.009
</p>

<p>
Li, W.-C., & Harris, D. (2013). Identifying training deficiencies in military pilots by applying the Human Factors Analysis and Classification System. <i>International Journal of Occupational Safety and Ergonomics, 19</i>(1), 3–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/10803548.2013.11076962
</p>

<p>
Li, W.-C., Zhang, J., & Kearney, P. (2023). Psychophysiological coherence training to moderate air traffic controllers’ fatigue on rotating roster. <i>Risk Analysis, 43</i>(2), 391–404. https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13899
</p>

<p>
Muecklich, N., Sikora, I., Paraskevas, A., & Padhra, A. (2023). The role of human factors in aviation ground operation-related accidents/incidents: A human error analysis approach. <i>Transportation Engineering, 13</i>, 100184. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.treng.2023.100184
</p>

<p>
Pratama, G. B., & Caponecchia, C. (2025). Examining the influence of national culture on aviation safety: A systematic review. <i>Journal of Safety Research, 92</i>, 317–330. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2024.11.020
</p>

<p>
Sedlar, N., Irwin, A., Martin, D., & Roberts, R. (2023). A qualitative systematic review on the application of the normalization of deviance phenomenon within high-risk industries. <i>Journal of Safety Research, 84</i>, 290–305. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jsr.2022.11.005
</p>

<p>
Teperi, A.-M., Paajanen, T., Asikainen, I., & Lantto, E. (2023). From must to mindset: Outcomes of human factor practices in aviation and railway companies. <i>Safety Science, 158</i>, 105968. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2022.105968
</p>

<p>
Tyagi, A., Tripathi, R., & Bouarfa, S. (2023). Learning from past in the aircraft maintenance industry: An empirical evaluation in the safety management framework. <i>Heliyon, 9</i>(11), e21620. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e21620
</p>

<p>
Zamarreño Suárez, M., Arnaldo Valdés, R. M., Pérez Moreno, F., Delgado-Aguilera Jurado, R., López de Frutos, P. M., & Gómez Comendador, V. F. (2024). Understanding the research on air traffic controller workload and its implications for safety: A science mapping-based analysis. <i>Safety Science, 176</i>, 106545. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssci.2024.106545
</p>

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