Identification and Validation of a Predicted Risk-Taking Propensity Model Among General Aviation Pilots

Risk-taking, a persistent topic of interest and concern in aviation, has been linked with unsafe behaviors and accidents. However, risk-taking propensity is a complex construct that encompasses numerous factors still being researched. Even within the limited research available about the factors affecting pilots’ risk-taking propensity, studies have yielded inconsistent results. Therefore, this quantitative study explores existing and novel factors that predict the propensity for risk-taking among general aviation (GA) pilots in the United States. This study, conducted in two stages, involved developing a prediction model using backward stepwise regression to predict pilots’ risk propensity, followed by model fit testing using additional sampling to validate the predicted model. Data was gathered using surveys from multiple local Experimental Aircraft Association (EAA) chapters in Central Florida and from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach campus. In Stage 1, the model was constructed based on data obtained from 100 participants. Stage 2 involved validating the model using responses from another 100 participants who answered the same set of questions as in Stage 1. Model validation encompassed three methods: correlation analysis, t-test, and cross-validity coefficient. The results from these analyses demonstrated a strong fit between the regression model and the Stage 2 data, affirming the accuracy of the prediction model. The analysis identified a model comprising seven significant predictors among a set of 12, accounting for 76% of the variance, with an adjusted R2 of 75%, influencing the risk-taking propensity among GA pilots. These predictors included age, total flight hours, number of flight ratings, number of hazardous events, self-efficacy, psychological distress, and locus of control. Model prediction and cross-validation were employed to enhance the findings’ rigor and generalizability. Practical applications and suggested areas for future studies are also discussed

Report of the workshop on Aviation Safety/Automation Program

As part of NASA's responsibility to encourage and facilitate active exchange of information and ideas among members of the aviation community, an Aviation Safety/Automation workshop was organized and sponsored by the Flight Management Division of NASA Langley Research Center. The one-day workshop was held on October 10, 1989, at the Sheraton Beach Inn and Conference Center in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Participants were invited from industry, government, and universities to discuss critical questions and issues concerning the rapid introduction and utilization of advanced computer-based technology into the flight deck and air traffic controller workstation environments. The workshop was attended by approximately 30 discipline experts, automation and human factors researchers, and research and development managers. The goal of the workshop was to address major issues identified by the NASA Aviation Safety/Automation Program. Here, the results of the workshop are documented. The ideas, thoughts, and concepts were developed by the workshop participants. The findings, however, have been synthesized into a final report primarily by the NASA researchers

Best Practices for Evaluating Flight Deck Interfaces for Transport Category Aircraft with Particular Relevance to Issues of Attention, Awareness, and Understanding CAST SE-210 Output 2 Report 6 of 6

Attention, awareness, and understanding of the flight crew are a critical contributor to safety and the flight deck plays a critical role in supporting these cognitive functions. Changes to the flight deck need to be evaluated for whether the changed device provides adequate support for these functions. This report describes a set of diverse evaluation methods. The report recommends designing the interface-evaluation to span the phases of the device development, from early to late, and it provides methods appropriate at each phase. It describes the various ways in which an interface or interface component can fail to support awareness as potential issues to be assessed in evaluation. It summarizes appropriate methods to evaluate different issues concerning inadequate support for these functions, throughout the phases of development

The Influence of Personality, Safety Attitudes, and Risk Perception of Pilots: A Modeling and Mediation Perspective

Objective: The purpose of the current study was to assess the influence of personality traits on safety attitudes and risk perceptions. Background: The ability to accurately assess risk remains a focal point of aviation training. This research seeks to understand if safety attitudes serve as a mediator. Method: Using a sample of 2,857 pilots, a statistical model was created through two independent stages. In stage 1, approximately 50% of the data were used to create the model using structural equation modeling techniques, and in stage 2, the model was independently validated. Results: The findings indicated that personality factors positively influenced risk perception, whereas personality increased, so did the pilot\u27s perception of the risk level. Self-confidence was negatively related to risk perceptions, indicating that a pilot\u27s self-confidence increases their perception of risk decreases. Additionally, self-confidence was a significant mediator to the relationship between personality factors and risk perception. Conclusion: The original scales had some validity issues, but the re-specified model provided some meaningful findings, especially in the relationships between personality traits, self-confidence, and risk perception. The model explained 26.4% of the variance in self-confidence and 9.5% of risk perception variance. Application: The findings highlight the importance for pilots to be aware of how increased self-confidence may influence their perceptions of risk. As pilots gain experience and self-confidence, care needs to be given to ensure greater risks are not taken, offsetting the value of the experience and self-confidence

What is Probable Cause, and Why Should We Care?: The Costs, Benefits, and Meaning of Individualized Suspicion

Taslitz defines probable cause as having four components: one quantitative, one qualitative, one temporal, and one moral. He focuses on the last of these components. Individualized suspicion, the US Supreme Court has suggested, is perhaps the most important of the four components of probable cause. That is a position with which he heartily agree. The other three components each play only a supporting role. But individualized suspicion is the beating heart that gives probable cause its vitality

Aerospace medicine and biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 359)

This bibliography lists 164 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information System during Jan. 1992. Subject coverage includes: aerospace medicine and physiology, life support systems and man/system technology, protective clothing, exobiology and extraterrestrial life, planetary biology, and flight crew behavior and performance

Detecting and Punishing Unconscious Bias

We present experimental results demonstrating how ideology shapes evaluations of technology aimed at detecting unconscious biases: (1) liberals supported use of the technology to detect unconscious racism but not unconscious anti-Americanism, whereas conservatives showed the reverse pattern, (2) liberals and conservatives opposed punishing individuals for unconscious bias but supported punishing organizations failing to use the technology to root out, respectively, racism or anti-Americanism, (3) concerns about researcher bias and false accusations mediated the effects of ideology on support for the technology, and (4) participants taking strong initial stands were likelier than moderates to reconsider their positions. Our findings demonstrate that there is substantial concern about penalizing unconscious bias at the individual level and that it will be difficult to generate broad support for regulation of unconscious bias at even the organizational level unless the technology is a reliable detector of unconscious biases that lead to frequent or serious antisocial behaviors

Don't Forget Your ABC's: Evaluating the State-of-the-Art in Chat-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Despite tremendous advancements in dialogue systems, stable evaluation still requires human judgments producing notoriously high-variance metrics due to their inherent subjectivity. Moreover, methods and labels in dialogue evaluation are not fully standardized, especially for open-domain chats, with a lack of work to compare and assess the validity of those approaches. The use of inconsistent evaluation can misinform the performance of a dialogue system, which becomes a major hurdle to enhance it. Thus, a dimensional evaluation of chat-oriented open-domain dialogue systems that reliably measures several aspects of dialogue capabilities is desired. This paper presents a novel human evaluation method to estimate the rates of many dialogue system behaviors. Our method is used to evaluate four state-of-the-art open-domain dialogue systems and compared with existing approaches. The analysis demonstrates that our behavior method is more suitable than alternative Likert-style or comparative approaches for dimensional evaluation of these systems.Comment: Accepted to ACL 2023; first two authors contributed equall

A systems approach to risk management through leading safety indicators

The goal of leading indicators for safety is to identify the potential for an accident before it occurs. Past efforts have focused on identifying general leading indicators, such as maintenance backlog, that apply widely in an industry or even across industries. Other recommendations produce more system-specific leading indicators, but start from system hazard analysis and thus are limited by the causes considered by the traditional hazard analysis techniques. Most rely on quantitative metrics, often based on probabilistic risk assessments. This paper describes a new and different approach to identifying system-specific leading indicators and provides guidance in designing a risk management structure to generate, monitor and use the results. The approach is based on the STAMP (System-Theoretic Accident Model and Processes) model of accident causation and tools that have been designed to build on that model. STAMP extends current accident causality to include more complex causes than simply component failures and chains of failure events or deviations from operational expectations. It incorporates basic principles of systems thinking and is based on systems theory rather than traditional reliability theory

MORAL CHARACTER, MOTIVE, AND THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BLAME

Blameworthiness, in the criminal law context, is conceived as the carefully calculated end product of discrete judgments about a transgressor\u27s intentionality, causal proximity to harm, and the harm\u27s foreseeability. Research in social psychology, on the other hand, suggests that blaming is often intuitive and automatic, driven by a natural impulsive desire to express and defend social values and expectations. The motivational processes that underlie psychological blame suggest that judgments of legal blame are influenced by factors the law does not always explicitly recognize or encourage. In this Article we focus on two highly related motivational processes – the desire to blame bad people and the desire to blame people whose motive for acting was bad. We report three original experiments that suggest that an actor\u27s bad motive and bad moral character can increase not only perceived blame and responsibility, but also perceived causal influence and intentionality. We show that people are motivated to think of an action as blameworthy, causal, and intentional when they are confronted with a person who they think has a bad character, even when the character information is totally unrelated to the action under scrutiny. We discuss implications for doctrines of mens rea definitions, felony murder, inchoate crimes, rules of evidence, and proximate cause