Compliance You Said? Why May Safety Critical Operators Deviate from Procedures? A Military Aviation Perspective Comparing Operators from Different Operational Fields

Abstract

From aviation accident and incident investigation reports, procedural deviations can be considered as recurring causes related to Human Factors. This research aimed at identifying perceptions of military aviation safety critical personnel regarding deviations; and their motivations to deviate. Deviations were suspected to be frequent but rarely reported or discovered. The choice was thus made to call upon sharp-end operators’ experience using a self-completion questionnaire to gather quantitative and qualitative data from Aircrew, Air Traffic Management, and Maintainers. The results suggested that the procedures themselves, resources, mission, organizational culture, and organizational environment can be considered as motivations to deviate. The organizational culture was potentially found as predominating over the considered group’s professional culture, and deployed operations as catalyzing deviations. A negative label was generally attributed to deviations by respondents. However, they reported that creative problem-solving in acute situations may require to adapt the existing decisional algorithms to reality of complex systems.