Crew resource management (CRM) is a team-safety practice that grew out of aviation and NASA human-factors research after decades of accidents where the aircraft was working and the crew's individual skills were sound, but the crew's shared picture of the situation had broken down. Applied to a chase, it means dividing tasks, sharing information openly, checking assumptions aloud, and making it easy for any crew member to raise a concern.
Where CRM came from
A 1979 NASA workshop on aviation safety concluded that most crashes were not caused by mechanical failure. They were caused by failures of communication, decision making, and leadership among crews that were otherwise well trained. The Federal Aviation Administration's own history of CRM traces the practice back to that finding.
Airlines built the first training programs in the early 1980s. The programs evolved through several generations, from individual leadership coaching to team-oriented coordination, to error management, and eventually to threat and error management that treats mistakes as expected and focuses on catching them before consequences propagate.
The core skills
Formal CRM training is built around a small set of skills that recur across every version of the program. Situational awareness, so the crew shares one picture of what is happening. Communication, so information is stated clearly and acknowledged. Workload management, so no one person is doing everything at the critical moment. Decision making under uncertainty. Leadership that invites input rather than punishing it.
Assertion is the skill that has to be explicitly built. Junior crew members historically hesitated to challenge senior pilots, and the accident record showed that hesitation costing lives. CRM introduced structured phrasing that makes a challenge routine rather than confrontational.
How chase crews apply it
A chase crew is a small team operating under time pressure with multiple simultaneous inputs. The parallels to a flight deck are direct. Driver handles the vehicle and the road picture. Navigator handles the storm, radar, and route options. A third seat, when available, monitors traffic and coordinates communications. All three trade updates on a short cadence and confirm major decisions aloud.
Any crew member can call a halt. The pattern used in aviation, in which a challenge is stated as a specific concern with a proposed action, transfers well: naming the problem, naming the risk, and naming the alternative. A driver who hears a clear structured challenge from the navigator is far less likely to dismiss it than one who hears a vague expression of unease.
Where it breaks down
CRM fails in predictable ways. Fatigue erodes attention and shortens replies. A crew that has been together a long time can develop shared blind spots that a newer team would not have. Success in prior intercepts can breed overconfidence, and success is a specific hazard because it removes the near-miss feedback that would otherwise reset the crew.
The mitigation is deliberate practice. Debrief after each chase day. Name what the picture was, where the shared model diverged from reality, and what the crew would do differently. The debrief is what turns a chase season into experience rather than a repeated sequence of the same close calls.