The effect of a safety crisis on safety culture and safety climate: The resilience of a flight training organization during COVID-19

The effect of COVID-19 on self-reported safety incidents in aviation: An examination of the heterogeneous effects using causal machine learning

INTRODUCTION

Disruptions to aviation operations occur daily on a micro-level with negligible impacts beyond the inconvenience of rebooking and changing aircrew schedules. The unprecedented disruption in global aviation due to COVID-19 highlighted a need to evaluate emergent safety issues rapidly.

METHOD

This paper uses causal machine learning to examine the heterogeneous effects of COVID-19 on reported aircraft incursions/excursions. The analysis utilized self report data from NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System collected from 2018 to 2020. The report attributes include self identified group characteristics and expert categorization of factors and outcomes. The analysis identified attributes and subgroup characteristics that were most sensitive to COVID-19 in inducing incursions/excursions. The method included the generalized random forest and difference-in-difference techniques to explore causal effects.

RESULTS

The analysis indicates first officers are more prone to experiencing incursion/excursion events during the pandemic. In addition, events categorized with the human factors confusion, distraction, and the causal factor fatigue increased incursion/excursion events.

PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS

Understanding the attributes associated with the likelihood of incursion/excursion events provides policymakers and aviation organizations insights to improve prevention mechanisms for future pandemics or extended periods of reduced aviation operations.

The relationship among safety leadership, risk perception, safety culture, and safety performance: Military volunteer soldiers as a case study

Safety is fundamental to any organization; if not based on safety, organizational decision-making and management would be meaningless. For a country, soldiers are responsible for national security; they serve as a barrier that defends a country against external invasive forces, thus assuming great missions and responsibilities on their shoulders. To ensure soldiers fulfill their duties of protecting the country and the people, they should gain clear risk perception, which should be instilled into them during their daily combat readiness training. Only when their performances meet safety criteria can they become a strong fighting force. This study recruited military volunteer soldiers as its research participants and employed convenience sampling to distribute questionnaires. In total, this research collected 725 valid copies, of which the data were used to explore the relationship among safety leadership, risk perception, safety culture, and safety performance. To achieve this goal, this study proposed some research hypotheses based on literature review. The hypotheses were all verified via latent variable modeling and multiple hierarchical regression analysis after the reliability and validity of each construct had been tested via confirmatory factor analysis. The research results showed that the more deeply military volunteer soldiers sense safety leadership, the clearer their risk perception will be and the more helpful it would be in achieving safety performance. It is worth mentioning that risk perception can serve as a mediator while safety culture can mediate the relationship between safety leadership and safety performance. Lastly, the research proposes suggestions in the section of conclusions, which provides reference to the combat readiness training and daily tasks of soldiers.

COVID-19 pandemic and air transportation: Summary of Recent Research, Policy Consideration and Future Research Directions

The COVID-19 pandemic can be considered an unparalleled disruption to the aviation industry in the last century. Starting with an at-that-time inconceivable reduction in the number of flights from March 2020 to May 2020, the aviation industry has been trying to navigate through and out of the crisis. This process is accompanied with a significant number of scientific studies, reporting on the direct and indirect impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on aviation and vice versa. This paper reviews the impacts in context of the recent literature. We have collected nearly 200 well-published papers on the subject in the years 2021/2022 and dissected them into a framework of eight categories, built around: airlines, airports, passengers, workforce, markets, contagion, sustainability, and economics. We highlight the essence of findings in the literature and derive a set of future research directions and policy considerations which we deem important on the way towards pandemic-resilient aviation.