مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

Safety is the most important issue in the aviation industry, and as such, airlines are engaging in various efforts to enhance the safety of their overall operations. Recently, among issues related safety, there has been a growing interest in the hazardous attitudes and safe operation behavior of pilots. Airlines are now making a significant effort to evaluate and understand these two factors with respect to their pilots (Ji et al., 2011). Depending on how a pilot recognizes and estimates a hazard during flight, the pilot may show hazardous attitudes, which would affect safe operation behavior. The extent of these attitudes and behavior might differ depending on the personal characteristics of pilots, including their cultural background and flight experience (Hunter, 2005).

Korean Air, Korea’s representative national airline, hires many of its pilots from abroad, thus creating a multicultural environment. For this reason, it is important to understand how cultural differences affect hazardous attitudes and safe operation behavior with respect to aircraft operation. Such studies on cultural differences have been conducted mainly in the domain of general management (Liao, 2015). However, there have been almost no studies on how the cultural background of airline pilots affects hazardous attitudes and safe operation behavior. Also, according to Wetmore and Lu (2005), hazardous attitudes and safe operation behavior may change depending on flight experience. As of yet, no studies have been conducted on airlines in Korea regarding the difference in hazardous attitudes and safe operation behavior depending on flight experience. Therefore, this study aims to rectify this gap in the literature. In particular, this study tries to analyze the differences in hazardous attitudes and safe operation behavior between Korean and non-Korean pilots as well as the differences in hazardous attitudes and safe operation behavior depending on total flight experience.