In both civil and military flying take-off and landing accidents represent a major part of all accidents. In both take-off and landing, the problems are becoming more acute with the current change to larger and faster aircraft, and even more significantly with the change to jet engines.

The majority of accidents occurring in these two phases of flight are attributed to “ human error,” or “ pilot's error of judgment,” but recent human engineering studies have shown that in many cases the real cause has been due to the engineering situation overloading the pilot in some way, or requiring him to make judgments based on insufficient information.