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.