Flying Off the Handle: Affective Influences on Decision Making and Action Tendencies in Real-World Aircraft Maintenance Engineering Scenarios

Abstract

While not as glamorous as flying, aircraft maintenance is a fundamental of aviation safety, and improper or inadequate maintenance can have far reaching consequences. With this in mind, and considering the paucity of substantive research in aircraft maintenance engineering, this study investigated how affect influenced decision making and action tendency in realworld challenging maintenance engineering scenarios in general aviation (GA). A study was undertaken combining a naturalistic decision making (NDM) technique with the Appraisal Tendency Framework (ATF) to analyze 10 different scenarios collected from aircraft maintenance engineers. A total of 11 contextual factors were elicited from which seven specific emotions emerged: anger, frustration, pride, hope, guilt, fear, and contempt. In most instances, the emotion was found to be incidental, meaning that the feelings at the time of the decision were not normatively relevant for deciding. Anger and contempt created action tendencies for risk taking, while feelings of pride were found to have a protective effect. The findings suggest that affect regulation is an inherent part of the system, such that affect dysregulation may represent a potential contributing factor for negative outcomes arising from action tendencies associated with other complex system influences. Future research directions are given.

Winging It: Key Issues and Perceptions around Regulation and Practice of Aircraft Maintenance in Australian General Aviation

“…This relationship, in turn, has a negative effect on the job satisfaction of technicians since they may perform their work (i.e., maintenance tasks) within a stressful environment. This view was supported in a previous related research [12,13].…”

“…Participants are asked to invent a challenging scenario specific to their work using illustrations to assist with verbalization and articulation in ways that encourage transitions from analytical and creative thinking, through to systems thinking [21] processes (i.e., holistic perceptions, consideration of changes over time) when answering their questions. The SITT has been used to elicit subject matter expertise and identify critical themes associated with safety, risk, training, and/or ways of working in a number of related complex domains [12,[22][23][24][25][26].…”

“…Improving human performance and perception around safety are among the areas that have been targeted by regulators for continuous improvement. The present study set out to build on previous substantive research [12,13] and examine this in a comprehensive way through semi-structured interview data elicited from Australian aviation maintenance engineers in GA using the following research questions:…”

The Essence of Care: Versatility as an Adaptive Response to Challenges in the Delivery of Quality Aged Care by Personal Care Attendants

“…Participants invent challenging scenarios that encourage transitions from analytical and creative thinking through to systems thinking processes (Checkland, 1980) that is, holistic perceptions and consideration of changes over time, when answering questions. The SITT has been applied to safety-critical work in rail (Filtness & Naweed, 2017;Naweed & Rainbird, 2015;Naweed, 2013;Roth et al, 2020), aviation (Naweed & Kingshott, 2019;Naweed & Kourousis, 2020), and tourism (Pabel et al, 2020;Reynolds et al, 2021), and has also been used to explore teamwork (Naweed, 2020).…”

“…Compared with other qualitative methods, a moderate sample size does not limit phenomenological research and in this case, fell within the "4-12 people" range supported by Creswell (2020). The SITT has also been applied successfully with this range (e.g., Naweed & Kingshott, 2019).…”