The article does not have a direct statement of the purpose; the authors explain point by point what precisely this article will set forth, thereby representing value for the scientific community. The article is an evidence-based report on the experience of a commercial aircraft crew. Over other researchers, Bennet (2006) notes his advantage: he collects primary data, taking a direct part in observing flight attendants and pilots. Secondly, this report, unlike many others, puts a conscious emphasis on the importance of teamwork in the field of civil aviation. The researchers focused on the interactions of workers with each other and how they jointly deal with tasks. This article does not intend to be a formal study but a foundation for subsequent studies, which will be based on observation.
Bennett (2006) repeatedly, especially at the beginning of the article, postulates the idea that his research has value in conjunction with other similar articles. He cites the early work of Burke, Wilson, and Salas (2003) as an example, citing the author’s need for systematic longitudinal research. It satisfies the needs of the scientific community for the sake of further investigation. The specialists’ lack for the paper can be explained through other main goals of the article: direct action report, emphasis on teamwork.
Taking into account the research of Burke, Wilson, and Salas (2003), Bennett (2006) wishes to test several assumptions in a longitudinal ethnographic stud; and all these assumptions are implied:
- People often believe that low-cost airlines provide low-quality services, and their employees are much less subject to standards.
- Teamwork is extremely essential for day-to-day operations and challenging tasks.
- Crew Resource Management (CRM) usually positively affects the formation of close relationships in the team, thereby improving the quality of service delivery.
Methodology
Bennett (2006) does not state anything about sampling, but what is described suggests that he used Convenience Sampling. The sample consisted of all employees of the civil aviation company where the scientist was able to conduct research from 2000 to 2005. During his work, Bennett (2006) tracked the behavior of novice and experienced pilots and flight attendants. He followed men and women, assistants and people in positions of responsibility, aiming to explore the relationship between them.
Bennett (2006) conducted an ethnographic study focusing on the culture of commercial aviation workers. This design is considered appropriate for checking cultural and professional backgrounds. Pilots and flight attendants presented examples of such employees, which allowed readers to consider their relationship in three dimensions: with each other (horizontally), with superiors (vertically), and with passengers. In the plane of Crew-Capitan, a subculture was formed when flight attendants and pilots could rally in opposition to parishioners from other areas: military aviation or business.
Investigator triangulation was not developed as Bennett (2006) did the research independently and did not seek help from others. The article offers only his point of view, confirmed by early research. Data triangulation has been used increasingly since Bennett (2006) used various data. He conducted interviews (data from conversations), researched (data from observations) by writing in a paper notebook, and he checked documents (data from official records). The triangulation of theories was not appropriately developed, although the researcher used many approved and popular sources and tried to follow this avant-garde. Methodological triangulation was used to a big extent since, despite relying on one design, the researcher was an analyst, an observer, and an interviewer.
The confirmability of this study was at a high level since Bennett (2006) did not contradict the data taken from earlier works. All the results are in a clear logic with the sources presented in parallel. Bennett (2006) questions the credibility of his study only once, citing another study as an example, which states that observation cannot fully answer the research question as it constructs the reality it investigates (Atkinson, 1990). Otherwise, Bennett (2006) ranks credibility reasonably high, although he recognizes the need for other observers (p. 97). The study has high dependability, and the results will be reliable even years later. Bennett (2006) describes the research context in great detail, which in the future will help other researchers in building the situation in which the researcher was, thereby minimally violating the objective reality of the research. The transferability of the study is relatively high since the results obtained can be transferred to other studies and even used as a foundation. From the rhetoric of Bennett (2006) and the description of goals, it is noticeable that he deliberately created research with high transferability.
Results and Conclusions
The researcher worked with the contexts and the natural environment of the employees, which makes the data obtained unstructured and, therefore, difficult to present and analyze. The contextual data was analyzed and presented smoothly, one quotation flows logically into another, and especially in the Introduction, the author uses many parallel sources to state the motivation for his research. The author is dependent on the context of his research, so he carefully treats contextual data. Considering the employees’ documents as contextual data, they were used in detail.
The results are presented in the context of the working groups followed by the researcher and not of each flight attendant or pilot individually. Bennett (2006) points out the external and internal factors that he found to influence the performance of flight teams. The main findings are:
- High team cohesion helps to cope with difficult situations and risks.
- Employees show solidarity through supportive jokes and physical assistance (bring bags, open and hold doors). Subordination does not prevent team members from supporting each other.
- Workers showed high morale and motivation, although fatigue in their work often showed up towards the end of the shift. They usually hide their fatigue behind jokes, including black humor.
- There was no bright opposition between us and them (the observation group and other employees, superiors, and passengers). However, it could show up when discussing leaders, but it never looked aggressive. Employees understand that the we-them separation will reduce the speed of coordination.
- The group’s cohesiveness allows chosen to follow strict standards and achieve high performance.
The study’s main conclusions relate to team building and how well-knit teams work under dangerous circumstances. They are concerned about commercial aviation workers’ culture and attitude to their responsibilities. The most important conclusion is that CRM raises the level of teamwork qualitatively. Recommendations for further practical actions relate to the mandatory installation of CRM technologies that bring trust and understanding between team members to a new level. Suggestions for further theoretical scientific research about calculating risks in the presence of teams trained or working on CRM technologies. According to Bennett (2006), other research should focus specifically on risk management in commercial aviation.
Critique
The author convincingly substantiated the need for this study, although he warned that the data analyzed in it are narrow enough to be extended to the problem of the human factor in aviation. The author explains the need for this study in longitudinal (emphasis on this) observations of groups of flight attendants and pilots, which may assist other researchers. The author underlines that it is not his analytics that is valuable, but his work for five years on interviews, review of documents, and observations.
The study has limited analytics and applied utility, and the author warns about this, although it is noticeable that he would like to write more about the study’s strengths. The article’s credibility may be high since, despite only one researcher, such an experiment model is easy to reconstruct. Each reader of the report can imagine himself in the author’s place and estimate that he would have discovered the same phenomena. Readers can appreciate the confirmability, as it is noticeable that the author does not strive for extraordinary statements and enjoys past research, trying to use them harmoniously by citing. The approach to dependability can be assessed as neutral; however, the author describes the context of his experiment. The path to transferability is highly appreciated since the author’s purpose when writing was to provide readers with vast data obtained over five years of research. Still, there are doubts that the provision of finds could be much more diverse and more prominent since the experiment was carried out for five years.
In the thick description, “Walk-out” and aircraft preparation and Sectors are the most useful information-filled parts. These parts contain a list of specific work cases with accurate citations of pilots who described their struggles with fatigue and other problems. In general, these parts can be called the core of the whole thick description, although there are one or two quotations in the Report part. The information in the thick description is highly organized, making it quickly accessible on first reading. It makes the article memorable from others that stand out only because of the statistics or overly technical severe terms.
The presented data, in general, are combined with the guesses and conclusions of the researchers. More precisely, it would be correct to say that the researcher commented on the data obtained and combined them with articles by other authors. Any quote from a pilot or flight attendant about fatigue or any joke could be backed up theoretically. These aspects of communication between crew members were reinforced by work from psychology, personnel management, and risk management.
The strength of the research is the organized and readable presentation of data that is not overloaded with complex terms and statistics. The same achievements of the author include the appropriate and detailed interspersing of quotes from pilots and flight attendants, as well as the correctly chosen sampling strategy. If the sample were chosen specifically for the study, there would be a bias in the results, and it would be impossible to assess the average culture of communication and behavior of pilots. The article’s weaknesses are the lack of visual methods for representing information and the researcher’s position during the experiment. Bennett (2006) describes that he sat behind the pilots for five years and wrote down what he saw in a paper notebook. Such a close position simultaneously allows you to have a good view of all the crew members and fix their interactions and behavior, but it violates the typical picture of the crew’s life.
I trust this study, but I think that the author did not give a sufficient number of concrete results for a five-year experiment. The case descriptions presented in an organized and easy-to-read manner were beneficial. There should have been more such cases; as an alternative, other cases could be shown in the article’s appendix, combined with exciting conclusions from the interview. For researchers dealing with issues of psychology and ergonomics, simple diagrams would be helpful, reflecting trends in answers to interviewer questions.
Reference
Atkinson, P. (1990). The Ethnographic Imagination. Textual Constructions of Reality. London: Routledge.
Bennett, S. A. (2006). A longitudinal ethnographic study of aircrews’ lived experience of flying operations at a low-cost airline. Risk Management, 8(2), 92–117. Web.
Burke, C. S., Wilson , K. A. and Salas, E. (2003). Teamwork at 35,000 feet: Enhancing safety through team training. Human Factors and Aerospace Safety, 3(4), 287 – 312.