It Was This Wing Wasn’t It? Identifying the Importance of Verbal Communication in Aviation Maintenance

Abstract

To place communication in context against other maintenance error promoting contributory factors and identify whether communication issues were written or verbal, a semi-structured interview schedule was used to ask 40 aircraft maintenance personnel what goes wrong when maintaining aircraft. Participants described 746 examples of contributory factors and undesired outcomes which were categorized using Dupont’s “dirty dozen.” 147 of the 746 descriptions were communication factors, of which 99 were verbal, 34 were written and 14 were general. Of 34 verbal and 19 written task miscommunication examples, 22 verbal and 10 written were accompanied by descriptions of undesired outcomes. The results suggest that commercial aircraft maintainers consider verbal and written communication as more important than other contributory factors.