African Symposium on Human Factors and Aviation Safety to take place next week

Its theme is ‘From reactive to proactive in safety and human factors’.

Hosted by the South African Air Traffic and Navigation Services (ATNS), in partnership with the Ergonomics Society of South Africa (ESSA), University of the Witwatersrand, ErgoAfrica, South African Airforce (SAAF) and Rhodes University and sponsored by ATNS, COMAIR, Thales, FormFunc, Birchwood Hotel and the Rail Safety Regulator of South Africa, it takes place at the Birchwood Hotel & Conference Centre in Gauteng on 13-15 September 2017.

Target audience 

The conference hopes to attract academics, students, government representatives and industry professionals in the ergonomics, human factors, aviation safety, transport, mining, railway, and healthcare industries from South Africa and beyond into the continent including: 

•  Academia - interested in human performance and safety research

•  Aero medical service providers

•  African air forces

•  African university’s psychology & industrial psychology departments

•  Air navigation service providers

•  Airlines - flight deck and cabin crews, technical crews

•  Airport operators

•  Employee health and wellbeing specialists

•  Ergonomics and human factors specialists

•  Government transport departments

•  Health and safety practitioners

•  Helicopter operators

•  Medical practitioners dealing with patient safety

•  Medical researchers interested in human performance and patient safety

•  Search and rescue service providers

•  Students interested in human performance and safety research

•  Transport safety practitioners & human factor specialists

From the informal economy of workers in rural South Africa to the bustling runways of OR Tambo international airport, there are many elements of these complex systems that may compromise safety at work. Through the application of human factors and ergonomics principles, incompatibilities within work systems can be better understood, thus enabling the development of proactive rather than reactive measures to improve human well-being and performance at work.

Keynote speakers 

Prof Peter Hancock, DSc, PhD, is provost distinguished research professor in the Department of Psychology and the Institute for Simulation and Training, as well as at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Systems at the University of Central Florida (UCF). He directs the MIT2 Research Laboratories and is associate director of the Center for Applied Human Factors in Aviation (CAHFA). 

Prior to his current position, he founded and was the director of the Human Factors Research Laboratory (HFRL) at the University of Minnesota where he held appointments as Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Psychology, and Kinesiology as well as at the Cognitive Science Center and the Center on Aging Research. He continues to hold an appointment as a clinical adjunct professor in the Department of Psychology at Minnesota. He is also an affiliated scientist of the Humans and Automation Laboratory at MIT, a research associate of the University of Michigan Transport Research Institute, and a senior research associate at the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition in Pensacola, Florida. 

Prof Paul Salmon is Professor of Human Factors and Director of the Centre for Human Factors and Sociotechnical Systems at USC. He has over 13 years’ experience of applied Human Factors research across a range of safety critical domains, including road and rail safety, defence, workplace safety, aviation, emergency management, and outdoor education. Paul joined USC in October 2012 on a senior research fellowship and also currently holds a prestigious Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Postdoctoral Training Fellowship in the area of Public Health.