Theories of Leadership and Management in the Royal Air Force - Essay Example

The Commercial airline also uses a rigorous interview process and 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 “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 aircraft and reducing 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 this area. There are a number of factors, which affect how a crew operate and include language and culture (national, organisational and professional). In the environment of the cockpit, how juniors relate to seniors is influenced by national culture. There are five essential sources of data that control training operations and safety. These are data from a performance by formal evaluation; reports of incidents; surveys of perceptions of the flight crew of safety and human factors; flight operation quality assurance programmes; line operations safety audits.  A careful analysis of aviation incidents and accidents will be crucial in trying to establish whether there is some correlation between incidents and training received or methods used.