The Federal Aviation Administration's Aviation Safety Action Program (ASAP) is a voluntary safety program that air carriers may establish to study pilot and crew performance on the line. In ASAP programs, pilots self-report incidents by filing a short text description of the event. This study seeks to develop a reliable and valid classification system for identifying and classifying the underlying causes of pilot errors reported under the ASAP. A thorough literature review was conducted, followed by pilot interviews and a card-sorting task, in order to develop the initial structure of the Aviation Causal Contributors for Event Reporting Systems (ACCERS) taxonomy. The reliability and utility of ACCERS was then tested by having pilots independently classify the primary and secondary causes of ASAP reports. The results provided initial evidence for the internal and external validity of ACCERS. Pilots were found to demonstrate adequate levels of agreement with respect to their category classifications. The overall findings indicate that ACCERS shows promise as a useful system for studying human error captured under pilot ASAP reports.
Abstract