Maurice Nevile
Integrity in the Airline Cockpit: Embodying Claims About Progress for the Conduct of an Approach Briefing
I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Language Studies, Faculty of Arts, at the Australian National University in Canberra. I am interested in routine talk-in-interaction in the airline cockpit, using as data audio and video recordings of pilots at work on regular scheduled passenger flights. I have written on processes of interaction as pilots develop and demonstrate to one another, moment-to-moment, their situated and evolving understandings of what they have done, what they know, where they are up to etc., as they perform the tasks required to fly their plane. In this paper I focus on two pilots' preparation for the descent and landing phase of flight as they perform a particular task, an 'approach briefing'. I consider how the pilot who leads the briefing creates understandings of his progress for the actions that constitute the task, making it possible to know when this or that action is begun, in-progress, and complete. The paper points to the relevance of micro-analysis of talk-in-interaction in the airline cockpit for two areas of practical interest to the commercial aviation industry, air accident investigators, and human factors researchers. It also presents a new approach for transcribing non-talk activities and their precise timing relative to talk.
