In December of 2014, a popular restaurant chain launched what seemed to be a fun and harmless use for mini UAS: a hovering bunch of mistletoe encouraging people to share a friendly kiss over the holidays. Never mind that the people selected might not be interested in that kind of involvement and create a mishap through their disagreement, a guest was injured in the execution of a landing.
HFACS would be useful in understanding this accident and in some of the ways human error affects UAS flight.
A notional HFACS analysis of this mishap:
Unsafe acts: 1. Skill based error: landing vehicle in a location not intended for landing, failure to perceive the motion of the landing zone, allowing aircraft to cause injury. 2. Decision error: due to the remote location of the operator, there is less of a sense of the hazard presented by the vehicle. The decision to land the aircraft too close to an individual could have been influenced by this false perception of safety caused by distance from the vehicle. The act could be seen as an exceptional violation, but only if a policy regarding flying the UAS too close to humans was in place.
Preconditions for unsafe acts: 1. The article gives little information regarding most of the preconditions. Alcohol was in the environment and there were likely social tensions exerting pressure on the operator and creating an adverse mental state. Crew Resource management may have also played a role in that the landing zone had not been pre-briefed on the hazards of moving her arm with a UAS on it.
Unsafe supervision: The news article seems to indicate that the operator of the UAS was an independent contractor, lack of communication between contractor and parent company on regulations and limitations of the promotion could have caused gaps in policy to arise. Inadequate supervision might have played a role.
Organizational influences: Finally the organizational climate was such that the operation of the UAS was a “promotional period”. This analysis is purely theoretical: A promotional event might not have received the type of hazard analysis required of operating an aerial vehicle. The contracting company takes on the risk of the operation of such a vehicle even though the specifics of it are handled by the expertise of the contractor. Organizational influence might have played out in that the contracting company might not have given much thought to preventing aviation mishaps at the dinner table.
Stampler, L. (2014, December 8). TGI Fridays Mistletoe Drone Literally Cut Off Part of Someone's Nose. TIME. Retrieved from
Leduc, P.A., Rash, C.E., and Manning, S.E. (2006, January 15). Human Factors in UAV Accidents. Retrieved from
Human Factors Analysis and Classification System. Retrieved 17 January, 2014 from Wikipedia:
