SynthOrange posted:

Signage on the outside.

Hot Karl Marx posted:

The company I work for (one of the largest in canada) motto is "Everyone safe, everyday!" & "Safety matters... Most!". All placesthat aren't small fly by night companies will have something similar

Three-Phase posted:

Real life (simulator)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swr74_CDyLk

Trabisnikof posted:

The CSB is a relatively newer thing, the fact that we have any governmental organization mandated to make those kinds of recommendations is actually huge.

It has worked too, there have been a few emergency changes made to standards due to CSB action.

Three-Phase posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nemYBeT4aQY

"Hey Jack, look at this feedwater level indicator!"

Real life (simulator)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swr74_CDyLk

Angela Christine posted:

Ahhhh, why is it that intense color?

haveblue posted:

This strikes me as unsafe

RabbitWizard posted:

This, however, seems to be unsafe:

Angela Christine posted:

Ahhhh, why is it that intense color? Is it supposed to be soothing? Help people stay alert? Remind them that if they fail everything they know and love will be glowing green?

Gorilla Salad posted:

It's a terrible design. Everything's far too similar in appearance and too far apart. But it looks nice.

FrozenVent posted:

It costs all of ten bucks to stencil "SAFETY FIRST!" All over poo poo so I wouldn't event use that as a mark of not being a fly by night poo poo show.

Gorilla Salad posted:

So many old control room were just terribly designed. They were designed by engineers with absolutely no regard for how humans take in information or react during a crisis.

I think even Three Mile Island happened due to lovely control room design.

I know of several air crashed which occurred because or poor alarm designs where the information just wasn't getting to the pilots that this particular alarm was what they needed to pay attention to, rather than the half a dozen other ones and the pilots got swamped with information rather than just being fed the important information.

quote:

Computerized medication alerts represent only a small fraction of the false alarms that besiege clinicians each day. Barbara Drew, a nurse-researcher at UCSF, has been studying a similar problem, alarms in the ICU, for decades. During that time, she has seen them grow louder, more frequent, and more insistent. She has witnessed many Code Blues triggered by false alarms, as well as deaths when alarms were silenced by nurses who had simply grown weary of all the noise.
A 2011 investigation by the Boston Globe identified at least 216 deaths in the U. S. between January 2005 and June 2010 linked to alarm malfunction or alarm fatigue. In 2013, The Joint Commission, the main accreditor of American hospitals, issued an urgent directive calling on hospitals to improve alarm safety. The ECRI Institute, a nonprofit consulting organization that monitors data on medical errors, has listed alarm-related problems as the top technology hazard in healthcare in each of the last four years.


[...]

I wanted to see if medicine might learn from other professionals who need to perform their tasks in a swirling, often confusing, high-stakes environment. The aviation industry seemed like a natural place to look, so I spoke to Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the famed “Miracle on the Hudson” pilot. “The warnings in cockpits now are prioritized so you don’t get alarm fatigue,” he told me. “We work very hard to avoid false positives because false positives are one of the worst things you could do to any warning system. It just makes people tune them out.” He encouraged me to visit Boeing’s headquarters to see how its cockpit engineers manage the feat of alerting pilots at the right time, in the right way, while avoiding alert fatigue.
I spent a day in Seattle with several of the Boeing engineers and human factors experts responsible for cockpit design in the company’s commercial fleet. “We created this group to look across all the different gauges and indicators and displays and put it together into a common, consistent set of rules,” Bob Myers, chief of the team, told me. “We are responsible for making sure the integration works out.”

I sat inside the dazzling cockpit of a 777 simulator with Myers and Alan Jacobsen, a technical fellow with the flight deck team, as they enumerated the hierarchy of alerts that pilots may see. They are:

* An impending stall leads to red lights, a red text message, a voice warning, and activation of the “stick shaker,” meaning that the steering wheel vibrates violently. “The plane is going to fall out of the sky if you don’t do anything,” Myers explained calmly.

* Further down the hierarchy are “warnings,” of which there are about 40. These are events that require immediate pilot awareness and rapid action, although they may not threaten the flight path. Believe it or not, an engine fire no longer merits a higher-level warning because it doesn’t affect the flight path. (“Fires in engines are almost nonevents now,” said Myers, because the systems to handle them are so robust.) The conventions for warnings are red lights, text and a voice alarm, but no stick shaker. Impressively, the color red is never used in the
cockpit except for high-level warnings — that’s how much thought the industry has given to these standards.

* The next level down is a “caution,” and there are about 150 such situations. Cautions require immediate pilot awareness but may not require instant action. Having an engine quit in a multiengine plane generates only a caution (again, my jaw drops when I hear this), since the pilot may or may not have to do something right away, depending on the plane’s altitude. A failure of the air-conditioning system — which ultimately can lead to a loss of cabin pressure — is another caution event. With cautions, the lights and text are amber, and there is only one alert modality, usually visual.

* The final level is an “advisory,” like the failure of a hydraulic pump. Since jets are designed with massive redundancy, no action is required, but the pilot does need to know about it, since it might influence the way the landing gear responds late in the flight. Advisories trigger an amber text message — now indented — on the cockpit screen, and no warning light.

For every kind of alert, a checklist automatically pops up on a central screen to help guide the cockpit crew to a solution. The checklists are preprogrammed to match the problems that triggered the alert.

And that’s it. I asked Myers and Jacobsen how, with more than 10,000 data points recorded on every flight, they resist the urge to warn the pilots about everything, as we seem to do in healthcare. “It’s a judgment call,” Jacobsen told me. “We have a team of people — experts in systems safety and analysis — who make that judgment.” Because of this process, the percentage of flights that have any alerts whatsoever — warnings, cautions, or advisories — is low, well below 10 percent.

I wondered whether the designers of individual components sometimes advocate for their own favorite alerts. Myers chuckled. “It’s funny, you’ll get some young engineer whose responsibility is the window heat system. He comes in with this list of 25 messages that he wants us to tell the pilot about his system: it’s on high, it’s on medium, it’s on low, it’s partially failed, you can’t operate it below 26 degrees. . . . He comes out of the meeting — a meeting in which the pilots say, ‘We don’t care!’ — and he’s like [Myers affects an Eeyore voice], ‘This is my job, this is my life, and it doesn’t even make it onto the flight deck.’”

Like many of aviation’s safety solutions, the parsimonious approach to alerts came from insights born of tragedies. “The original ‘gear down’ warning was linked to the throttle,” recalled Myers, meaning that it went off, falsely, every time the pilot slowed the plane. “So the pilots’ learned response was throttle back, disconnect the alert.” Predictably, this led to accidents when pilots ignored this alert even when there truly was a problem. Another example: in the early days of the Boeing 727, some alerts were so frequent and wrong that pilots yanked the circuit breakers to quash them.

When I told the Boeing engineers about my world — not only the frequency of computerized medication alerts, but also the ubiquity of alarms in our intensive care units — they were astonished. “Oh, my goodness,” was all Myers could say.

Dread Head posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAIY0I5GGw4

Three-Phase posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nemYBeT4aQY

"Hey Jack, look at this feedwater level indicator!"

FIRST TIME posted:

"Look like I've just been in one of them bukakke pornos!"

Carbon dioxide posted:

It just says "POISON" on the tin and it contains something something cyanide.

So, no worries.

Munin posted:

Cyanate, very different from Cyanide.

Phanatic posted:

This is a really big deal. Works like that for medical alarms, too. Walk through an ICU or even most hospital rooms and alarms are going off everywhere all the time, and they get ignored. If they're ignorable, they shouldn't be alarms in the first place.

G-III posted:

CSB just put up a new video on youtube. God I love these things:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbFzuS8Bdhw

spog posted:

I am sure I watched a documentary about fighter jets that used the voices of the pilot's children as alarms. The idea being that the pilot would pay a lot more attention to them, rather than a computer voice.

I can;t find anything on the web that refers to that - perhaps it was a prototype?

Phanatic posted:

Never heard that, but it's not a "computer voice" in the first place, it's usually an actual person's digitally recorded voice. And it's true that early human factors research indicated that pilots were more likely to hear and respond to a female voice rather than a male one, so female speakers have typically been used for the enunciated warnings.

That research, though, is from back in the days when pilots were almost exclusively men.

Phanatic posted:

Never heard that, but it's not a "computer voice" in the first place, it's usually an actual person's digitally recorded voice. And it's true that early human factors research indicated that pilots were more likely to hear and respond to a female voice rather than a male one, so female speakers have typically been used for the enunciated warnings.

That research, though, is from back in the days when pilots were almost exclusively men.

Wikipedia posted:

"Early human factors research in aircraft and other domains indicated that female voices were more authoritative to male pilots and crew members and were more likely to get their attention. Much of this research was based on pilot experiences, particularly in combat situations, where the pilots were being guided by female air traffic controllers. They reported being able to most easily pick out the female voice from amid the flurry of radio chatter.

Kim Crow - Crow's was the first voice ever to be digitized. Pilots and astronauts know her as the original Bitching Betty."

Blistex posted:

Phanatic posted:

Never heard that, but it's not a "computer voice" in the first place, it's usually an actual person's digitally recorded voice. And it's true that early human factors research indicated that pilots were more likely to hear and respond to a female voice rather than a male one, so female speakers have typically been used for the enunciated warnings.

That research, though, is from back in the days when pilots were almost exclusively men.

Say Nothing posted:

Orcs and Ostriches posted:

I've seen quite a few videos like this, and can't comprehend how it happens. Do people just get nervous and forget how to throw?

Say Nothing posted: