An assessment of the leadership and training techniques used in the Essay

An assessment of the leadership and training techniques used in the Royal Air Force and the Commercial Aviation Industry - Essay Example IOT is used to select potential officers. The Commercial airline also uses a rigorous interview process, and the aptitude testing at RAF Cranwell. It is the widely held view that a team will perform better than an individual in the cockpit is. Crew Resource Management (CRM) training in the United States stems from a workshop â€Å"Resource management on the flight deck† sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 2000. This conference was the result of NASA research into causes of air traffic accidents. The findings presented at this conference pointed to human error in the majority of air crashes being because of interpersonal communications, decision-making and leadership. The object of CRM is to ensure that the performance of the team is more important than the performance of the individual in a two pilot cockpit. Effective CRM will ensure that leadership and management skills enable the team to work safely, thereby ensuring the safety of the ai rcraft and reduce aviation accidents so far as is reasonably practicable. CRM can today be seen as the effective utilisation of all available human, informational, and equipment resources toward the goal of safe and efficient flight. It will be necessary to have an understanding of the RAF and Commercial flying training methods and management styles in order to produce a safe and efficient environment. Where humans are used in conjunction with machines, errors are inevitable. There are five types of error to be looked at here: procedural, communication, proficiency, decision making and intentional non-compliance. In order to understand this area, one must be clear about the differences between a manager and a leader. Another topic that needs to be researched is whether leadership can be taught or whether people are born as leaders. Dr Howard Kahn has researched into this area. There are a number of factors, which affect how