Shared Perspectives of Aviation Safety Among Managers and Technicians
by HAVADER Editör Ekibi
An aviation accident is almost never the result of a single cause; it's usually a chain of small human errors lining up. The "dirty dozen" — twelve well-known factors — describe the most common sources of those human errors. This study compares how maintenance managers and technicians view these factors, and the disagreement that emerges is genuinely instructive.
The goal was to gather expert opinion on which "dirty dozen" factors lead to unwanted incidents, then weight those criteria using the SWARA method. Put simply: do maintenance managers and technicians agree on what threatens safety the most?
The answer: no. Maintenance managers ranked "lack of situational awareness" as the most critical factor, while technicians pointed to "stress" instead. That might look like a small detail at first glance, but it's actually a significant signal: managers frame the problem as an information/attention issue, while frontline workers experience it as a matter of human endurance.
The value of this finding is that it shows safety-culture efforts can't be shaped by a single top-down approach — they need to listen to manager and technician perspectives separately. An everyday analogy: it's the difference between hospital management saying "hygiene protocols aren't being followed" and nurses saying "it's hard to follow every rule to the letter at this pace and workload" — both are right, but they're seeing the problem from different vantage points, and the solution needs to account for both.
In the end, this research signals that airlines designing safety training shouldn't overlook frontline experience — a program that helps technicians cope with stress looks very different from one focused on managers' concern about situational awareness.
The goal was to gather expert opinion on which "dirty dozen" factors lead to unwanted incidents, then weight those criteria using the SWARA method. Put simply: do maintenance managers and technicians agree on what threatens safety the most?
The answer: no. Maintenance managers ranked "lack of situational awareness" as the most critical factor, while technicians pointed to "stress" instead. That might look like a small detail at first glance, but it's actually a significant signal: managers frame the problem as an information/attention issue, while frontline workers experience it as a matter of human endurance.
The value of this finding is that it shows safety-culture efforts can't be shaped by a single top-down approach — they need to listen to manager and technician perspectives separately. An everyday analogy: it's the difference between hospital management saying "hygiene protocols aren't being followed" and nurses saying "it's hard to follow every rule to the letter at this pace and workload" — both are right, but they're seeing the problem from different vantage points, and the solution needs to account for both.
In the end, this research signals that airlines designing safety training shouldn't overlook frontline experience — a program that helps technicians cope with stress looks very different from one focused on managers' concern about situational awareness.