Investigations into aviation, commercial shipping, rail, and highway incidents indicate the majority of causes or contributing factors are related to human failures. There is a
strong likelihood that the same can be said for recreational boating.
But getting beyond
likelihood to more conclusive evidence on their contribution requires consistently-collected data and information that not only identify factors that contributed to the incident, but also get at
how and
why the human failures occurred.
In 2012, NASBLA's
ERAC began its trek toward understanding human error and the factors that might be associated with performance failures in recreational boating incidents.
A year later, the committee
adopted a “lite” version of the
Department of Defense’s Human Factors Analysis and Classification (HFACS) for analyzing cases, and used human performance investigation tools developed by the
National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) to try to determine whether more human factors information could reasonably be gathered in the context of recreational boating incident investigations. The result was the
release in 2014 of guidance and a supplemental report form for officers and investigators in states wishing to augment their investigations, add to the knowledge about human factors, and use it to evaluate their own safety programs and strategies.
But
analysis of results from a pilot test by investigators in the state of Tennessee led to revisions to the
guidance and
report form in 2016. A
2017 "HFACS-lite" examination of some additional case reports from Florida-- at a greater level of detail than what was typically recorded in the U.S. Coast Guard's Boating Accident Report Database--was conducted in preparation for more extensive field testing of the revised supplemental report form in selected states.