What Would You Have Done? Learning From Others' Aviation Safety Events

The capacity to learn from both expected and unexpected events has been identified as a critical component of resilient performance. One’s own experiences, however, are not the only opportunities to learn from these types of events. In the aviation domain, operator-submitted safety event reports can also provide a rich source of opportunity for learning from what others have experienced. In addition to maintaining the world’s largest collection of voluntarily submitted aviation safety incident reports, NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) also publishes a monthly online safety newsletter, CALLBACK, which periodically features a segment called “What Would You Have Done?” These segments offer readers a chance to “interact” with information from previously submitted reports. Readers are presented with “the first half of the story”, describing a situation leading up to a critical decision, and then asked to exercise their own judgment and decision-making skills by thinking through “what would you have done?”. Later in the newsletter, “the rest of the story” is presented, so readers can see what actions were taken by the incident reporters. The intent of this feature is to “stimulate thought, training, and discussion” related to the reported incidents. There is a rich research literature on the learning benefits of elaborating and organizing information. The current study seeks to expand on the question “what would you have done?” to explore further ways to consolidate learning from others’ experiences, using reports submitted to ASRS by Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (UAS) operators.