Integrity in the Airline Cockpit: Embodying Claims About Progress for the Conduct of an Approach Briefing

Abstract

Toward the end of every airline flight, the pilots must prepare and agree on a plan for how the final stages of the flight-the descent, approach to the runway, and landing-will proceed, for what it is that they will do and know, as a crew, to bring their plane safely and unremarkably (all going well) to the ground. This plan emerges from a specific cockpit task called an approach briefing, which the pilots complete. In this article, I used transcriptions from video recordings of pilots at work on an actual scheduled passenger flight to examine in microdetail processes of talk-in-interaction as pilots conduct an approach briefing. My main interest is to show how the approach briefing emerges as talk and nontalk activities (e.g., writing, touching displays) are precisely coordinated to constitute a series of embodied claims, by the pilot leading the briefing, about his progress in conducting the various parts of the task. I suggest that this coordination is constitutive of work in the airline cockpit and most likely other sociotechnical work settings. In these settings, it is critical to perform and complete tasks and the talk and nontalk activities required for them in strict sequence, and so it is critical to ensure a kind of integrity in creating understandings of conduct in the trajectory of task-related actions. I suggest that the methods and findings of this article have a particular applied significance for commercial aviation, related research in aviation human factors, and accident investigation, particularly for the description and analysis of 2 key constructs: situation awareness and human error. In the article, I also present a new way for showing in transcriptions details of nontalk activities and their timing relative to talk.