Consideration of human factor in aeronautical maintainability

In order to better account for the human factors in maintenance activities, maintainability now takes into account the field of ergonomics. Design engineers try to integrate and validate this new requirement with the same consideration they give to the design constraints. However, previous scientific research highlights the lack of optimization or compromise between the design standards and the ergonomic requirements [1]. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to establish which ergonomic skills and tools should be used and how they are utilized by design engineers to evaluate the human factor. We performed an in-depth observation of the maintainability department of helicopter manufacturers in France. Our results show that ergonomics is integrated in the design process by mainly considering the physical factors, by using engineering tools and not ergonomic tools.