Resilience and Safety for In-Time Monitoring, Prediction, and Mitigation of Emergent Risks in Commercial Aviation

Safety in aviation has been historically defined in terms of the occurrence of accidents or recognized risks; that is, safety is typically defined in terms of things that go wrong. An alternative and complementary approach is to focus on what goes right, and identify how to make that happen again. Focusing on the rare cases of failures attributed to “human error” provides little information about why human performance almost always goes right. Similarly, focusing on the lack of safety provides limited information about how to improve safety. This work builds upon a growing literature on resilience engineering and new approaches to safety (Hollnagel, 2014; Hollnagel, Woods, & Leveson, 2006). Data were collected from commercial airline pilots and air traffic controllers that illustrate the prevalence and value of resilient behaviors observed as routine in everyday operations. Results of data analyses as well as approaches to identify novel methods for data collection on resilient behavior for use in development of intime safety monitoring, prediction, and mitigation technologies are described