Communication Strategies for Correcting Errors

摘要

Maintaining safety in high-risk engineered environments like aviation is a team effort that depends crucially on the team members' efficiency in monitoring each other's performance and on their effectiveness in intervening if they consider a decision or action to be unsafe. Unfortunately, analyses of aviation accidents and incidents indicate that pilots, in particular junior pilots, have frequently failed in this important crew function, especially in situations in which their interventions posed a direct challenge to the other crewmember's judgment and decision-making skill. In such situations, junior crewmembers will sometimes only hint at the possibility of a problem rather than tell the captain explicitly to perform a corrective action. This kind of communication failure has been identified as a 'monitoring/challenging error' by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and was found to occur in over 75 percent of the accidents reviewed. Moreover, monitoring/challenging failures appear to contribute to 'plan continuation errors.' These are errors in which the crew continues with its planned course of action in the face of cues suggesting that the plan should be reconsidered. The research reported here is an effort to understand communication strategies for correcting crew errors, and looks at differences in strategies as a function of crew position (captain vs. first officer) and of risk and face-threat posed by the problem.