Aviate, Navigate, Communicate: Silence, Voice and Situation Awareness in Aviation Safety

Abstract

The purpose of this dissertation is to show how important human communication is in order to accomplish a safe flight. A flight is represented as an act of conversation that combines culture with communication of co-present and cooperative actors, in the highly mediated environment of the flight deck. The value-added contribution of this dissertation has been to infuse communicative components to, both, human factors and systems theoretic approaches to aviation, in a way that has not been done before by communication scholars. The discursive space of a cockpit consists of actors that take roles and apply rules to complete tasks with their social actions. Conversation takes place in a time-critical situation and interlocutors have to keep track of responding to demands. They must comprehend the system in its entirety, position their role in it, and remain vigilant for consequentiality. Cockpit conversation is an interaction spoken not yet heard; heard not yet understood; understood not yet agreed; agreed not yet applied; and applied not yet always applied. Talk and, as emerged, silence too is inseparable from the task, as necessary to develop understanding of the flight situation. Language and action are juxtaposed in real-time speech acts. Interlocutors (pilots and ATC) act according to what they communicate and communicate in order to act. With the use of a grounded theory approach, real-life scenarios for in-depth interviews with aviation informants were developed and analyzed using discourse analysis and closed reading. Four theoretical contributions were accomplished: (i) the deconstruction of silence phenomenon in multiple dimensions (personal, operational, institutional and regulatory), as part of an interaction; (ii) the synthetic proposition of a voice-categorical label which consolidates paralanguage and hesitation, non-verbal and verbal attributes, in a communication channel applicable in aviation; (iii) the incorporation of situation awareness, with its views of local, transitory and global, as a component in communication models; and (iv) the revisit of mother tongue as a non-conflictual but complementary communication tool which may facilitate linguistic security, instead of competing with the topical standardized English in aviation. Aviate, navigate, communicate is the tri-fold of flight implementation in search of the flying instinct.%%%%Ph.D., Communication, Culture, and Media – Drexel University, 2014