How reliance on resilient performance 'hides' or even contributes to system brittleness
(2021) FLMU16 20211Division of Risk Management and Societal Safety
- Abstract
- Aviation is known to be safe, partly due to highly specialized pilots who undergo extensive training to fulfill and maintain their function at the sharp end.
More demands are placed on the pilots as complexity continues to grow in aviation. This is due to more technology, more rules of compliance, more diversity in operations, and less time to do it all in the aggressive competitive world of aviation. Alongside this grows the increase in demands on the pilot's adaptive capacities to balance safety and productivity. But is work designed to support and assist resilient performance and consider the well-being of the humans in the system? What constraints influence the adaptive capacities, and what does this mean to the overall performance... (More) - Aviation is known to be safe, partly due to highly specialized pilots who undergo extensive training to fulfill and maintain their function at the sharp end.
More demands are placed on the pilots as complexity continues to grow in aviation. This is due to more technology, more rules of compliance, more diversity in operations, and less time to do it all in the aggressive competitive world of aviation. Alongside this grows the increase in demands on the pilot's adaptive capacities to balance safety and productivity. But is work designed to support and assist resilient performance and consider the well-being of the humans in the system? What constraints influence the adaptive capacities, and what does this mean to the overall performance of a system? More resilient or more brittle?
This thesis explores these questions by incorporating perspectives from a group of pilots (micro-level), a safety department (meso-level), and a group of CAA flight inspectors (macro-level). This is done to better understand what it means to work in an airline and explore whether a ‘dark’ side to the resilient performance potentially influences the system’s overall performance.
This study reveals a gap between work-as-imagined based on the dominant safety paradigm prevalent in aviation, and work-as-done, based on value rationality. For pilots to meet multiple conflicting goals simultaneously, they develop their own adaptive strategies, resources, and artifacts. They do this to sustain the daily operation to an extent of adaptive saturation, influencing the resilient performance of a system that goes unnoticed and unaddressed. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9061001
- author
- Furdal Damm, Gitte LU
- supervisor
- organization
- course
- FLMU16 20211
- year
- 2021
- type
- H1 - Master's Degree (One Year)
- subject
- keywords
- Resilience, Resilience Engineering, Safety, Risk, Work, Aviation, Aviation Safety, FLMU06
- language
- English
- id
- 9061001
- date added to LUP
- 2021-08-16 16:56:04
- date last changed
- 2021-08-16 16:56:04
@misc{9061001,
abstract = {{Aviation is known to be safe, partly due to highly specialized pilots who undergo extensive training to fulfill and maintain their function at the sharp end.
More demands are placed on the pilots as complexity continues to grow in aviation. This is due to more technology, more rules of compliance, more diversity in operations, and less time to do it all in the aggressive competitive world of aviation. Alongside this grows the increase in demands on the pilot's adaptive capacities to balance safety and productivity. But is work designed to support and assist resilient performance and consider the well-being of the humans in the system? What constraints influence the adaptive capacities, and what does this mean to the overall performance of a system? More resilient or more brittle?
This thesis explores these questions by incorporating perspectives from a group of pilots (micro-level), a safety department (meso-level), and a group of CAA flight inspectors (macro-level). This is done to better understand what it means to work in an airline and explore whether a ‘dark’ side to the resilient performance potentially influences the system’s overall performance.
This study reveals a gap between work-as-imagined based on the dominant safety paradigm prevalent in aviation, and work-as-done, based on value rationality. For pilots to meet multiple conflicting goals simultaneously, they develop their own adaptive strategies, resources, and artifacts. They do this to sustain the daily operation to an extent of adaptive saturation, influencing the resilient performance of a system that goes unnoticed and unaddressed.}},
author = {{Furdal Damm, Gitte}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
title = {{How reliance on resilient performance 'hides' or even contributes to system brittleness}},
year = {{2021}},
}