Decoding Tragedy: A Historic Quantitative Ethnographic Analysis of Pilot Discourse Before Aviation Accidents

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Saturday 9:45 am - Gold 3
  In Roundtable Session: Case Studies of Large Scale Data Systems: Modeling Best Practices

Abstract

This is a preliminary paper that aims to analyze pilot discourse prior to Aviation Accidents. Airplanes are generally equipped with two black boxes, A Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) and a Flight Data Recorder (FDR), by transcribing and analyzing both recorders, a codebook will be developed, and an Epistemic Net-work Analysis (ENA) will be utilized to illustrate communication in the cockpit. The data from this study seeks to answer the following research questions: (1) What communication patterns emerge prior to an accident? (2) Can patterns identi-fied in pilot discourse be used to predict potential safety risks or accident likeli-hood in real-time scenarios? This is a critical study extending from the field of aviation to others high stakes situations involving human factors.

Author

• Abdulla Kamali, Pepperdine University