The methods most tools document,
eAviora computes.

See the highlighted block above the contents list. The rest of this article walks through what “computed, not documented” actually means, the methods in the catalogue, how the AI-drafted first pass works, and why a structured method beats a free-text box.

Ask most aviation safety tools whether they “support HFACS” and the honest answer is: they support a HFACS document. You get a blank PDF template, or a styled form with four headings, and you fill it in by hand. The method is on the page; the analysis is still entirely manual, and it lives off to the side of the occurrence record rather than inside it.

That is documenting a method. It is better than nothing, but it leaves the hardest parts — structuring the factors, keeping them consistent across investigations, connecting them to the controls that failed — on the investigator's shoulders, in a file the rest of the system never reads.

Computing a method is different. The platform draws the method as a working surface: the four HFACS tiers as a structured ladder, the SHELL components as interfaces you assess one by one, the Tripod Beta tree, the Fishbone spine, the Swiss-Cheese layers, the bow-tie itself. You work inside the structure of the method instead of typing prose into a blank box, and the result is part of the record, not a document next to it.

The short version: a documented method is a template you fill in; a computed method is a surface the platform renders and keeps connected to the record it explains. eAviora ships the second kind.

The catalogue covers the methods aviation investigators actually use. Each one has its own dedicated on-screen renderer — not a shared free-text field with a different heading.

• HFACS— the Human Factors Analysis and Classification System, a four-tier human-factors model that sorts contributing factors into unsafe acts, preconditions for unsafe acts, unsafe supervision and organisational influences. It gets a dedicated renderer that draws the four tiers, so factors land in the right level instead of in a paragraph.
• SHELL— the model that examines the mismatches between people and the system around them: the interfaces between the human and the software, the hardware, the environment, and other people. Rendered as the components to assess, not a wall of text.
• Tripod Beta— the latent-failure method that traces each event back through its immediate causes to the underlying conditions that allowed it. Rendered as the structure the method asks for, so the latent failures are captured, not implied.
• Fishbone (Ishikawa)— the cause-and-effect diagram that groups contributing factors along a spine, so categories of cause are visible at a glance.
• The Reason (Swiss-Cheese) model— organisational defences as layers with gaps; an event passes through when the gaps line up. Rendered as the layers, so the holes that aligned are explicit.
• Bow-tie— the top event in the centre, threats on the left, consequences on the right, and barriers along the paths between. Rendered as the working diagram, with each barrier carried as a control you can rate, not a box you describe.

Because each method is computed rather than documented, the platform can do something a PDF cannot: connect the analysis to the rest of the investigation. The HFACS factors, the SHELL mismatches and the Tripod Beta latent failures sit on the same connected operation as the bow-tie barriers and the corrective actions, so the method explains the record rather than describing it from the outside.

A blank method, computed or not, is still a blank method. The hardest part of any structured analysis is the first pass — turning the facts of the occurrence into a starting structure. eAviora handles that with an AI-drafted first pass: against each method, the AI assistant proposes a starting analysis, already laid out in the method's structure.

Then a human validates it. This is the rule, not a setting: the AI proposes, the investigator decides. The draft is a starting point, never the finding. The investigator reads it, edits it, accepts the parts that hold and rejects the parts that do not. Nothing is accepted simply because the AI suggested it.

The value of the first pass is that it removes the blank-page problem without removing the investigator's judgement. An empty HFACS template makes you start cold; an AI-drafted HFACS analysis gives you a structured proposal to argue with — faster to a defensible result, and still owned by the person whose name is on the investigation.

It is tempting to treat investigation as a writing task: a good investigator writes a good narrative, so give them a big text box. The problem is that a text box records what one person thought to write on one day. The next investigation, by a different person, captures different things in a different order — and now the two cannot be compared.

A structured method asks the same questions in the same shape every time. The four HFACS tiers are always the four HFACS tiers. The SHELL interfaces are always the same interfaces. Tripod Beta always asks for the latent failures. That consistency is not bureaucracy — it is the only thing that lets an analyst look across a year of investigations and see a pattern: the same precondition recurring, the same supervisory gap, the same SHELL mismatch.

A dedicated renderer for each method is what enforces the shape. A free-text box cannot: it accepts anything, so it captures everything and compares nothing. Rendering the method means the contributing factors land where the method says they should, and the platform can carry them forward — into the bow-tie barriers, into the corrective actions, into the record the investigation belongs to.

And because the methods run inside the investigation stage of the occurrence workflow, on the same connected operation as the barriers and the corrective actions, the analysis links to the record it explains. A bow-tie that is a working surface rather than a spreadsheet, and an investigation that connects the occurrence to the actions that follow, are the same idea applied to the same record — one connected operation, not a folder of documents.

See the SMS module for where the investigation stage lives, the glossary entry for HFACS for the method definitions, or contact us to walk through your operation.