An Approach to Identifying Aspects of Positive Pilot Behavior within the Aviation Safety Reporting System

• Main Authors: Matthews, Bryan, Barshi, Immanuel, Feldman, Jolene
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: ASRS; Automation; Aviation Safety; Behavioral sciences; Human Factors; NLP; Quality assurance; Safety; Safety management; Text Mining; Training; Transportation
• ISSN: 2155-7209
• DOI: 10.1109/DASC58513.2023.10311185

The National Airspace System (NAS) is constantly evolving as air traffic continues to ramp up to pre-pandemic numbers and projected to grow to unprecedented levels in the coming years. As well as increasing demand to the current system, Emerging operations such as Unmanned Autonomous Systems are also expected to add to complexity to the airspace. To address these issues, the industry and government agencies supporting the NAS will need to rely upon additional automation and new technologies to address future operational requirements, while continuing to be a world-leading safe transportation system. As these new technologies are implemented, the system continues to rely on human pilots and controllers in the loop to monitor the system and intervene in situations the automation cannot handle. The goal of proactively addressing safety is of foremost concern to ensure passenger well-being. The industry has implemented various Safety Management Systems to identify safety risks and proactively address them before they result in a serious incident or accident. One such program is NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS). ASRS is a long-established system where pilots and controllers voluntarily and anonymously report safety incidents they experienced and observed during line operations by providing rich text narratives describing the events, the environment, and conditions leading to the safety event of concern. These narratives provide insight and context around events of interest and can be used to identify emerging problems. These reports can also trigger investigations within Flight Operational Quality Assurance or Flight Data Monitoring programs. However, this process typically focuses on the adverse events and the unsafe aspects of the operations surrounding the reported or detected events. This perspective of investigating factors that went wrong around an adverse event is commonly referred to as Safety I. Alternatively, characterizing successful actions that operators perform every day under varying conditions that keep the system within safe operating bounds is a concept referred to as Safety II. The benefit of the Safety II view is that its scope is much larger than that of Safety I since a vast majority of the operations result in successful flights. Many of the successful techniques used to manage operational threats are not documented in standard operating procedures or taught during training. They are typically acquired over time by working w