Aviation safety expert key player in primetime documentary
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At the request of “Sole Survivor” director Ky Dickens, Pruchnicki assisted with technical work, film interviews and voicovers before eventually becoming an associate producer of the film. The film’s broadcast premiere is scheduled for January 9, 2014 at 9:00 p.m. on CNN.
Pruchnicki spent 10 years as a captain with Comair Airlines and was extensively involved with both local and national safety work for the Air Line Pilots Association International (ALPA). He participated in numerous accident investigations with the NTSB, including the Comair 5191 Lexington, KY accident where he was ALPA’s principle human factors investigator.
That experience is put to good use at Ohio State, where Pruchnicki teaches aviation students about safety, human factors, accident investigation and complex aircraft operation.
“We are teaching our students how important it is to understand how these events occur, despite having such a robust and safe transportation system,” he said. “When you examine these accidents, you have to understand the entire picture.”
“Single acts by one person do not cause accidents, it’s about all the components and the interactions between them,” he said. “The end goal of this course and our research is to better understand how these interactions erode our margin of safety to the point of an accident, and how can we better predict this and detect in real time a system that is heading towards collapse.”
Pruchnicki is a member of the International Society of Air Safety Investigators, the Association for Aviation Psychology and the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. He holds a bachelor’s degree in pharmacy from The Ohio State University, a master’s with distinction in Aeronautical Science/Human Factors from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University and is pursuing a PhD in cognitive engineering at Ohio State.
