Human Factors in Light General Aviation Aircraft: A Failure for our Profession?

Aviation can be described as the birth place of human factors. A quick glance at the funding sources and the publications in the discipline shows that we are still quite tightly tied to aviation. Cockpit automation, mode errors, ATC workload are among topics that are currently well represented in the human factors literature. However, the place where human factors could make it biggest impact in terms of safety and error prevention, general aviation (GA), is still basically a human factors waste land. If one looks at the current statistics of light aircraft accidents, it reads like a list of errors and design problems described in any introductory human factors text.