Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2016
The purpose of this paper is to attempt to examine the relations between airworthiness and safety.
It seems to me that the problem of safety in aviation is fundamentally a problem of human behaviour. The human controlled aeroplane is mechanically extended man. To quote Sherrington
“The cerebrum … . comes, … to be the organism par excellence for the readjustment and the perfecting of the nervous reactions of the animal as a whole, so as to improve and extend them. These adjustments … . in higher animals form the most potent internal condition for enabling the species to maintain and increase its dominance over the environment in which it is immersed.”
If we exclude the effect of the counter strategies of competition an accident is a measure of the incompleteness of this dominance.