Toward the end of every airline flight, the pilots must prepare and agree on a plan for how the final stages of the flight-the descent, approach to the runway, and landing-will proceed, for what it is that they will do and know, as a crew, to bring their plane safely and unremarkably (all going well) to the ground. This plan emerges from a specific cockpit task called an approach briefing, which the pilots complete. In this article, I used transcriptions from video recordings of pilots at work on an actual scheduled passenger flight to examine in microdetail processes of talk-in-interaction as pilots conduct an approach briefing. My main interest is to show how the approach briefing emerges as talk and nontalk activities (e.g., writing, touching displays) are precisely coordinated to constitute a series of embodied claims, by the pilot leading the briefing, about his progress in conducting the various parts of the task. I suggest that this coordination is constitutive of work in the airline cockpit and most likely other sociotechnical work settings. In these settings, it is critical to perform and complete tasks and the talk and nontalk activities required for them in strict sequence, and
This article uses transcriptions from video recordings of airline pilots at work, on actual flights, to consider some locations and the interactional significance of a feature of routine talk in the airline cockpit: and-prefaced turns. As pilots’ work is formally organized for them as many discrete and ordered tasks, and-prefacing is a local means for maintaining an ongoing sense of their conduct of a flight as a whole. By and-prefacing their talk, pilots present some new talk or task as connected and relevantly next in a larger macro-sequence of work for their flight. And-prefacing is evidence of pilots’ orientation to a sense of sequence that can extend well beyond pairs of turns at talk and/or non-talk activities, or even a series of such paired sequences. It allows pilots to make salient the sequentiality of their work where the officially prescribed wordings they must use can leave this implicit.
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