From Tenerife to Three Mile Island: What Aviation and Nuclear Can Teach UK Industry About Resilience.
- David Yates
- Apr 9
- 8 min read
The Pattern We Keep Missing.
Some systems break dramatically. Others bend quietly until something gives. In high-risk environments, that distinction matters, because often the final failure is just the last domino, not the first one.
Crew Resource Management (CRM) emerged not because of one failure, but because of a pattern.
Human decisions made under pressure.
Communication breakdowns. Hierarchies that silenced the very voices that could have changed the outcome. Across aviation and nuclear power, those patterns cost lives and eventually forced change.
What’s less well known is just how much these industries had to unlearn to make that change happen.
CRM wasn’t a procedural update. It was a cultural rewiring, of leadership, of communication, of the very idea of what competence meant.
Aviation and Nuclear led the way, not because they were smarter, but because they had no choice.
Now, other sectors face growing complexity and pressure of their own and the question is not just what they will learn, but when and how much it will cost them if they wait.
This is the story of CRM’s origin in the cockpit and the control room and the extraordinary, overlooked opportunity to bring those hard-earned lessons to the UK gas energy sector and beyond.
CRM in Aviation: Born from Catastrophe, Built for the Future
CRM was born in smoke and silence, on a foggy runway at Los Rodeos Airport, Tenerife, in 1977. The deadliest accident in aviation history wasn’t caused by an engine failure or another technical problem.
It was caused by misunderstanding. By reasons specific to the human condition. Misunderstandings, incomplete communication, time pressures. Normal operation under abnormal strain.
Many hundreds of people lost their life this day, not because anyone was incompetent, but because people could not speak clearly and be heard.
In the aftermath, NASA and several pioneering airlines began to explore what was really going wrong in flight decks. The answer wasn’t technical. It was human. Teams were well trained, but their communication was inconsistent.
Authority gradients were steep. Workload and stress narrowed attention and when something unusual happened, there was no shared method for diagnosing or deciding.
That was the origin of CRM, a new way to think about how teams work under pressure. It shifted focus from individual technical expertise to collective human performance. It addressed leadership, communication, decision-making and situational awareness.
It taught crews how to brief, how to speak up, how to monitor each other’s actions and how to recover together when things went wrong.
Over time, CRM proved itself not just as a safety intervention, but as a multiplier of technical performance. Crews that communicated well made faster, better decisions.
They caught errors earlier. They adapted more easily to the unexpected. CRM didn’t replace technical skill, it amplified it.
CRM in Nuclear: A Parallel Journey with One Crucial Lag
Just two years after Tenerife, the nuclear energy sector faced its own reckoning. In 1979, Three Mile Island suffered a partial meltdown after a cascade of errors, alarms misunderstood, systems misread, operators overloaded and unsupported. The gap between design intent and human response had never been more clear.
The industry’s answer was the creation of INPO, the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations and later WANO, its international counterpart. But in the early years, nuclear training remained focused on engineering excellence.
The operating model assumed that if individuals had high technical knowledge and followed procedure, safety would naturally follow. Teams were expected to figure out coordination on the job. Human factors were still underemphasised.
The traditional structure reinforced hierarchy. Orders were followed. Junior staff deferred. Near misses weren’t reported because the culture was punitive.
In many ways, nuclear culture resembled aviation’s pre-Tenerife state; rule bound, competent and vulnerable in ways it couldn’t yet see.
Then came Chernobyl. Davis-Besse. And more close calls where the themes were eerily familiar:
Communication failures
Excessive deference to authority
Poor coordination
Decision-making under stress
A slow slide into normalisation of deviance
Eventually, the pattern became undeniable. The industry recognised the need for a systematic approach to non-technical performance, just as aviation had done.
Control Room Resource Management: The Seismic Shift
In 1988, INPO issued its now-famous 88-003 guideline: “Teamwork and Diagnostic Skills in the Control Room.” It marked a turning point.
From that moment, CRM-style training began to be embedded directly into nuclear operations.
The name was different, Control Room Resource Management, but the DNA was the same. Communication protocols. Assertiveness. Situational awareness. Decision-making under uncertainty. Feedback and self-monitoring.
The technical-only model was broken open, and interpersonal dynamics were recognised as fundamentally important.
Training evolved into immersive, experiential formats, often run in full-scope simulators, mirroring the aviation model.
Crews were assessed not just on what they did, but how they did it together. Were they briefing before shifts? Cross-checking each other’s assumptions? Managing workload? Debriefing after events?
These weren’t just soft skills, they were system stabilisers and then came the cultural shifts.
Culture Change: Just Culture and Flattened Hierarchies
For CRM/non-technical training to work, the operating environment had to change. That meant dismantling the punitive culture that discouraged open reporting.
Enter the idea of a just culture, where honest mistakes are seen as opportunities to learn, not grounds for punishment.
This wasn’t easy. Many nuclear organisations had to confront decades of ingrained hierarchy. But over time, leadership began to shift from command-and-control to inclusion and deference to expertise.
Operators were encouraged to challenge.
Supervisors were trained to listen.
The most informed voice, not just the most senior one, began to guide decisions.
Pre- and post-shift briefings were reimagined as critical thinking touchpoints, not admin formalities. Teams were expected to plan together, anticipate threats and learn collectively from what unfolded. Just like aviation.
What emerged was not a single programme, but a multi-layered approach: training, culture, systems, leadership and peer learning, all moving together. Over time, human factors became embedded not just in the simulator, but in the everyday DNA of high-performance operations.
Industry-Wide Learning: INPO, WANO and Aviation Regulatory Parallels
One of the most powerful enablers of CRM/non-technical training in both aviation and nuclear was the industry-wide learning model.
INPO and WANO created structured, peer-reviewed systems for sharing lessons. If something went wrong at one plant, the analysis and learning was shared across the entire fleet. That learning was rapidly turned into guidance, training updates and cultural feedback loops.
In aviation, this mirrors the work of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and mandatory occurrence reporting.
Lessons are codified, anonymised and disseminated. Safety isn’t siloed, it’s shared.
This kind of collective vigilance is what keeps high-reliability systems resilient. Not because they never fail, but because they learn before it’s too late.
The Impact: Performance, Safety and Cost-Benefit
What did all this effort achieve?
In the U.S., nuclear plant unplanned shutdowns dropped from seven per year to near zero. Plant capacity factors soared. Safety metrics improved dramatically.
The cost-benefit became clear: well-coordinated teams made fewer errors, recovered faster from anomalies and kept plants online longer.
The data regarding the specific financial benefits of internal CRM programmes at a major UK energy producers has not yet been publicly released, however the benefit of such changes has been broadly discussed and widely repeated within the industry.
These discussions have demonstrated significant financial and operational benefits associated with increased uptime, improved team performance and reduced downtime, outcomes known to carry significant financial impact in the energy sector.
Their training was delivered by aviation-based specialists and tailored for the energy context, proving not just that human factors works, but that cross-industry translation is possible and profitable.
Similar outcomes were seen at Exelon Nuclear in the U.S. and across Korean plants adopting human factors principles.
The results weren’t just safety wins. They were business wins, reliability, uptime, staff engagement and the clearest metric of all.. profit.
In a world of tight margins and optimisation pressure,
Non-technical training is one of the few interventions that improves both human and financial outcomes.
The Setbacks: Resistance, Inertia and the Cost of Delay
Of course, not everyone welcomed CRM/non-technical training with open arms.
Early efforts were met with scepticism. Some senior managers dismissed it as a “soft skills fad.” Others questioned whether communication and culture could really affect technical operations. It took hard evidence and, in some cases, near misses, to overcome resistance.
At Daya Bay, after an incident that traced back to non-technical failures, the industry was forced to admit that engagement with human factors had stalled. The early momentum had faded.
Inertia had crept in.
Once again, it took an incident to restart the conversation.
The lesson is simple: proactive investment in human performance is always cheaper than reactive recovery, but it requires vision.
It requires someone to see past the spreadsheet and recognise that training is not a cost centre.
It’s a stabiliser.
A multiplier.
A cultural firewall.
The Gap in Industry: Same Risks, Less Support
So what of the UK energy sector?
Here, the challenges are similar, but a standardised non-technical infrastructure is missing.
Gas turbine power stations are complex systems. They operate under time pressure, often with reduced staffing and in some cases, ageing assets. Control rooms must navigate load demands, maintenance constraints, environmental risks and market volatility. Teams make high-consequence decisions daily.
Yet human factors training is not standard. There is no INPO equivalent. Seemingly, no regulated requirement for non-technical skills training. Common language for team performance under pressure remains locally controlled.
Perhaps because gas power doesn’t carry the same public risk perception as nuclear, it’s easier to overlook the parallels.
But they are there. The risk of normalisation of deviance. The potential for communication breakdowns. The losses from unplanned downtime. And the psychological strain on teams operating within an increasingly complex grid.
It’s not a question of whether these issues matter, they clearly do. Understandably, it’s more a question of when the time will be right for the industry to address them in a standardised way.
In many respects, aviation and nuclear had this thrust upon them out of necessity. That external pressure catalysed thought, reform and resilience.
There is much to be learned from that.
A Vision for Resilience: More Than CRM
CRM taught aviation and nuclear that human performance wasn’t a soft edge, it was the core. But in a modern context, that lesson evolves. It becomes something broader. Something more transferable.
That’s where structured, non-technical training enters the conversation.
Built from CRM’s foundations, shaped by behavioural science and human factors and applied through decades of lived experience in high-stakes environments, this is resilience not as an abstract concept, but as a discipline.
One made up of repeatable, professional behaviours.
Taught deliberately.
Practised consistently.
Embedded until they’re second nature.
Because real resilience isn’t something you switch on in a crisis and off when the pressure drops. It’s not an emergency-only skillset.
It’s a daily way of operating, visible in how teams communicate, make decisions, recover from setbacks and perform with clarity under both normal and abnormal conditions.
The Strategic Advantage of Proactivity
Much of what CRM addressed in aviation and nuclear was reactive. It came after tragedy or crisis.
There is however, growing recognition that proactive investment in non-technical skills, situational awareness, communication, decision-making and collective focus, creates strategic and operational advantage.
It improves reliability. It reduces downtime. It builds teams that don’t just cope, but adapt with cohesion and clarity.
In markets where over-optimisation has stripped out buffer zones, this kind of structured human performance training can restore the capacity to navigate complexity without burnout or breakdown.
It’s no longer about safety alone.
It’s about sustainable performance.
An Evidence-Based, Human-Centred Approach
What does this look like then? It’s a rigorous, transferable set of operational behaviours drawn from decades of cross-industry learning, aviation, nuclear, space and systems engineering.
It focuses on the one domain where most industries remain underprepared: people making decisions under pressure.
Because no matter how smart the system, final responsibility still rests with humans and those humans need training not just in what to do, but in how to function, especially when stress, uncertainty or complexity enter the room.
Where This Really Leads
The best time to adopt these practices was 20 years ago. The next best time is now.
Aviation and nuclear proved that investing in non-technical skills doesn’t just prevent disaster. It strengthens everything.
Decision quality.
Team cohesion.
Safety.
Reliability.
Performance.
Morale.
Profit.
For sectors like the UK energy industry and the wider industries navigating change, the opportunity exists to embed those same practices before the pressure builds.
Structured, industry-specific non-technical training can shift the dial.
From firefighting to foresight.
From individual survival to collective resilience.
From brittle systems to sustainable performance.
This isn’t about making people tougher.
It’s about making them ready.
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