Maintaining safety in high-risk engineered
environments like aviation is a team effort that
depends crucially on the team members' efficiency in
monitoring each other's performance and on their
effectiveness in intervening if they consider a decision
or action to be unsafe. Unfortunately, analyses
of aviation accidents and incidents indicate that
pilots, in particular junior pilots, have frequently
failed in this important crew function, especially in
situations in which their interventions posed a direct
challenge to the other crewmember's judgment and
decision-making skill. In such situations, junior crew-members
will sometimes only hint at the possibility
of a problem rather than tell the captain explicitly to
perform a corrective action.
This kind of communication failure has been
identified as a "monitoring/challenging error" by the
National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and was
found to occur in over 75 percent of the accidents
reviewed. Moreover, monitoring/challenging failures
appear to contribute to "plan continuation errors."
These are errors in which the crew continues with its
planned course of action in the face of cues suggesting
that the plan should be reconsidered. The
research reported here is an effort to understand
communication strategies for correcting crew errors,
and looks at differences in strategies as a function of
crew position (captain vs. first officer) and of risk and
face-threat posed by the problem.
Three studies were conducted to determine
(1) what strategies captains and first officers indicate
they would use to correct errors in hypothetical
situations, (2) what strategies captains and first
officers judge most effective in getting them to
change their own behavior, and (3) what kinds of
communication strategies pilots actually use when
confronted with errors in simulated flights. The first
two studies were paper and pencil tasks and the third
was conducted in a 747-400 simulator.
It was hypothesized that captains would be more
direct in correcting first officers than first officers
would be in mitigating errors by the captain. However,
for both crew positions communications were
expected to be more direct during high-risk or
emergency situations than during low-risk incidents.
In addition to risk, pilots' communications were
hypothesized to be sensitive to the degree to which
an error implied a threat to the professional "face" of
a crewmember. If the other pilot has made an
obvious error, calling attention to it may involve a
direct challenge to the pilot's status, judgment, or
skill. In situations like these, politeness dictates the
use of more indirect speech than would be the case
in situations that are less face-threatening.
In the first paper and pencil task, participating
pilots received descriptions of aviation incidents and
were asked to state how they would correct various
pilot errors. As predicted, captains were more direct
than first officers were: they predominantly used
commands, whereas first officers preferred to use
hints. The risk level also influenced pilot interventions
in the predicted direction: captains and first
officers were more direct in high-risk situations. In
contrast, pilot responses to varying levels of face-threat
of the incidents were not consistent with the
predictions made by politeness theory.
The second paper and pencil task examined
which types of communication would be most
effective in correcting pilot errors. Pilots were asked
to rate how effective various communication strategies
would be in getting them to carry out the
speaker's intent. As shown in figure 1, both captains
and first officers favored communications that
appealed to a crew concept rather than to any
particular status-based model, and consistently rated
commands, the most direct communication strategy,
as less effective than crew suggestions or preferences.
The third study examined pilot error-challenging
strategies during a full-mission simulation study.
Errors based on those used in the paper and pencil
tasks were scripted into flight scenarios, which
participating pilots flew with a research confederate
pilot trained to perform the scripted errors. The
results of this study indicate that both captains and
first officers used error-correcting strategies that
supported a positive crew climate, such as strong
hints and suggestions. As expected, both captains and
first officers were sensitive to risk, and communicated
more directly when risk was high. The influence of
face-threat was somewhat different for captains and
first officers, as expected from their differences in
rank.
These findings, which have identified the strategies
most effective for mitigating errors in the cockpit,
can aid in the development of training under the
safety program that helps pilots develop more
effective error-correction strategies.
Point of Contact: J. Orasanu
(650) 604-3404
jorasanu@mail.arc.nasa.gov
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