AsafetyculturequestionnaireforEuropeanairtrafficmanagement.docVIP

A Safety Culture Questionnaire for European Air Traffic Management R.Gordon B. Kirwan Eurocontrol, Bretigny, France K. Mearns University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, Scotland R. Kennedy Boeing Research Technology, Madrid, Spain C. L. Jensen Integra A/S, Vedbaek, Denmark ABSTRACT: This paper describes an approach to investigating safety culture in Air Traffic Management (ATM) built on a theoretical framework of 13 safety culture dimensions derived from a review of the safety climate/culture literature from 2001-2005, and interviews in 4 European ANSPs. From this we generated a three-pronged approach to studying safety culture in ATM – a diagnostic questionnaire measuring attitudes to safety, follow-up interviews to further probe values and beliefs and responses to scenarios to identify how people would behave under certain conditions. The questionnaire stage is described in this paper and outlines the development of an instrument designed to identify safety culture strengths (enablers) and vulnerabilities (disablers). This questionnaire was tested with a representative set of ANSP stakeholders and completed by 119 ATM personnel. The questionnaire will be tested in other European ANSPs in the near future. INTRODUCTION The term safety culture gained its first official use in an initial report into the Chernobyl accident (IAEA, 1986), where it was introduced to explain the organizational errors and operator violations that laid the conditions for disaster. Public Inquiries have since implicated poor safety culture as a determinant of several high-profile accidents, such as the fire at King’s Cross underground station (Fennell, 1998); the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise passenger ferry (Sheen, 1987), the passenger train crash at Clapham Junction (Hidden, 1989), and the Dryden incident (Maurino, Reason, Johnson Lee, 1995). In light of these findings, the relevance of safety culture to safe operation is not disputed (Cox Flin, 1998). With reference to the Che