The Flight Safety Office (FSO) of the Spanish Army Airmobile Force. (Fuerzas Aeromóviles del Ejercito de Tierra) (FAMET), wanted to foment safety attitudes related to flight operations among its pilots and cabin crews. They needed to know how accurate the awareness was of safety attitudes related to safety topics and the potential areas of errors. The mission of the FSO, among others, is to prevent those erroneous actions attributable to defective interpretations, ignorance or inattention of the flight crew. With this purpose in mind, the FSO got in touch with the research team. The first objective was to determine in a reliable way the degree of risk of each of a series of flight situations. Two approaches were used: 1) The method of “Apparently equal intervals” (Thurstone, 1928), based on the judgement of experts, and 2) The record of the estimated frequency of the occurrence of incidents and risk factors. The second objective was to create a risk perception scale in order to have an evaluation instrument available to measure the perception of risk in pilots and/or future pilots. The Items were selected from the database provided by the FSO, which consisted of archived records of past incidents, and also based on literature related to flight safety and other risk factors. The sample was composed of voluntary pilots not in active service at the time of filling out the self-reports. They represented a large part of the population of interest. The resulting report has made it possible (a) to have an instrument to evaluate the quality of the risk perception in a quantitative way, at the same time that (b) it allowed the FSO to carry out campaigns with the objective of increasing the precision of the evaluations about flight safety issues among the crews and detect the potential areas of error where the perceived risk was underestimated, so attention could be dedicated to them. (Author/publisher) This publication may be accessed by Internet users at: http://www.ictct.org/workshop.php?workshop_nr=25
Abstract