Safety culture in air traffic management: Air traffic control

In a joint research project – Human Factors in
Air Navigation Services, HUFA – between the
Swedish Civil Aviation Administration and Lund
University the focus is on human and organizational
factors and safety in air traffic control.
The Swedish Air Navigation Services (ANS)
are undergoing major organizational changes in
order to adapt to changing demands on efficiency
and technical development in air traffic control. In
these change processes the foundations of the safety
work can be affected and changes in the existing
safety culture can be introduced.
The aim of the project is to study safety culture
and related organizational areas in order to monitor
these during the change processes. Another aim is
to study relations between safety culture on one
hand and the team climate, organisational climate,
psychosocial working environment and leadership
on the other hand in order to develop a base for
improving safety culture. In the investigation three
measurement rounds will be conducted during the
course of about three years. Study locations are the
two main air traffic control centers (ATCCs) in
Sweden and parts of the ANS office.
This paper will present the project and give
some results from the safety culture part of the
study, gained from the first completed measurement
round. Preliminary findings concerning the
psychosocial working environment will also be
presented here.
The results suggest that most dimensions in the
safety culture model used in the study can be
described as predominantly positive at all three
study locations (e.g. Attitudes to safety, Safety
related behaviors and Risk perception). However,
some individual safety culture-topics were found to
be problematic, and imply a need for improvement.
The results of the psychosocial study showed a
pattern indicating that managers experience the
working environment as better than the nonmanagers
at all three study locations. At the two
ATCCs there was also a pattern showing that the
group of administrative personnel judged the
psychosocial working environment to be better than
the operative personnel did.