Context
This project examines the Titanic disaster through a human factors lens, using HFACS to organize how crew decisions, communication patterns, and company policies interacted over time.
Rather than retelling the full historical narrative, the work concentrates on where information failed to move, how roles were structured, and which organizational choices influenced risk.
Approach
- Structured incident data and secondary sources into HFACS levels to separate organizational influences from frontline actions.
- Highlighted specific communication gaps between roles to understand how warnings and updates were handled.
- Outlined alternative paths that would have reduced the number of ways small errors could accumulate into a larger failure.
Key insights
- Breakdowns in communication were tightly coupled with organizational expectations and norms rather than being isolated mistakes.
- Several points in the chain of events involved unclear priorities, which left operators to trade off speed, workload, and safety in ad‑hoc ways.
- Relatively small changes in how information was escalated and validated would have closed off entire branches of the error pathway map.
Impact and reflection
The analysis illustrates how HFACS can surface latent conditions and supervisory choices that are otherwise easy to overlook in incident narratives.
It also demonstrates that meaningful safety improvements often come from changing how organizations coordinate and communicate, not just from training individuals.