Development and Validation of a Survey to Assess Safety Culture in Airline Maintenance Operations

This paper describes the development and validation of a survey to assess safety culture in airline maintenance operations according to the five-factor model of safety culture proposed by Wiegmann et al. (2002). Maintenance technicians at two FAR Part 121 scheduled passenger airlines (N = 109 and 76) completed the original version of the survey. The results yielded useful diagnostic information about the safety culture of each airline, but factor analyses indicated that the five-factor model may not be adequate to describe the data. A more complex model is proposed and modifications to the survey are suggested