Differences between human reliability approaches in nuclear- and aviation-safety

Any industry has its own constraints which led to certain approaches for running the business and for dealing with safety issues. However serious events and accidents are showing that industries can learn a lot from each other, in particular in the field of human factors and human errors. This paper is a contribution to a cross-industry discussion of human factor issues. It outlines an approach to learn from decisions taken in an industry and the dynamic development of human factor issues rather than a comparison of differences in the state of a technology regarding human factor issues. The paper presents the opinion of the authors and not necessarily the ones of Eurocontrol. It is based on the authors' experience in both nuclear power plant (NPP) industry and air traffic management (ATM) over several years.