Why Commercial Pilots Voluntarily Report Self-Inflicted Incidents

Abstract

Abstract. Voluntary incident reports by commercial pilots provide essential data for airline efforts in learning from incidents (LFI). Because LFI is frequently limited by pilots not reporting incidents voluntarily, we interviewed seven commercial aviation safety experts in a focus group to derive factors influencing the voluntary reporting behavior of pilots’ self-inflicted incidents. As a result, we derived 36 factors and integrated them into a motivational framework by van den Broeck et al. (2019) . Pilots pursue various goals when voluntarily reporting incidents, such as enabling safety-related change or organizational learning. This behavior is influenced by personal antecedents, such as shame, and contextual antecedents, such as feedback. Our work expands the understanding of motivational aspects of voluntary incident reporting and discusses practical interrelations.