Validating a Model of Team Collaboration at the North American Aerospace Defense Command Using Selected Transcripts from September 11, 2001; Master's thesis

摘要

On September 11, 2001, during an exercise at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), air traffic controllers in New York, Boston, Washington and Cleveland discovered that four American commercial airliners had been hijacked. Initially, the officials at NORAD's North East Air Defense Sector (NEADS) were confused as to whether the hijackings were real world or part of an exercise. The goal of this thesis is to investigate the teamwork and collaboration that occurred between NEADS, their counterparts at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and various air traffic control centers in order to provide military air support and ground civilian air traffic over the United States. Transcripts of recorded audio from the command and control center at NEADS were coded and analyzed in an effort to use a real world example to empirically validate the structural model of team collaboration, developed by the Office of Naval Research. The model focuses on individual and team cognitive processes used during collaboration with the goal of understanding how individuals and teams work together under stress to make decisions.