MRM Training, Evaluation, and Safety Management

Maintenance resource management (MRM) programs started as training programs aimed at increasing the awareness regarding human performance limitations in the aviation maintenance environment. Since their inception in 1989, MRM programs in the United States have undergone 4 generations of development (Taylor & Patankar, 2001 Taylor, J. and Patankar, M. 2001. Four generations of maintenance resource management programs in the United States: An analysis of the past, present, and future.. The Journal of Air Transportation World Wide, 6(2): 3–32. [Google Scholar]) and are currently morphing themselves yet again toward the 5th generation, one that incorporates a Federal Aviation Administration-approved voluntary error-reporting program such as the Aviation Safety Action Program (ASAP) or a generic or internal error-reporting program. This article describes the MRM training, evaluation, and safety management research program as it tracked the evolution of training content as well as the attitudinal, behavioral, and performance changes toward the development of proactive safety management programs.