Abstract:

In 1980, The Royal Norwegian Air Force (RNOAF) acquired 72 F-16 fighter aircraft that represented an operational leap forward and a risk due to significant technological changes and operational procedures and training. During the next two decades, the F-16 community experienced many accidents. Some of these can be directly related to introducing new technology, others due to organizational challenges such as high turnover rate among fighter pilots, reduced squadron experience level, and lack of necessary supervision and training. This study aims to investigate the accident reports of 12 accidents and to examine how risk handling changed in the RNOAF and its implication for the education of fighter pilots.

The research material is collected from the archives of the Flight Safety Inspectorate (Flytryggingsinspektoratet). In addition, interviews with fighter pilots were also conducted. The article identifies important themes in understanding the accidents, divided into structure and culture. The study reveals the following factors related to structure: authorization, work demand, and continuity. Regarding culture, we identify thresholds to raise voice/ concern, reporting, experience, and continuity. Both structure and cultural factors play a complementary role.

During the period of the study, we see that the accident reports changed after 1997, focusing more on human and organizational factors, including training and education, in line with Reason's advice (1997). We also see from our material that more formal training and higher standards in training raised safety performance. In addition, the Royal Norwegian Air Force has adopted the concept of “Just Culture” (Flytryggingsinspektoratet, 2016), which also can be rooted back to Reason (1997) and Dekker (2016). We highlight that “just culture” is something that needs to be reached, trained for, and maintained. There has been a lot of focus in the literature on psychological safety in recent years. The article will demonstrate how psychological safety was developed and address important factors that can contribute to establishing and maintaining psychological safety. The F16 was phased out in 2020 and replaced by the F35. The article therefore addresses how technology and education must go hand in hand. We also stress the importance of the F-16 community's experiences in educating new pilots and maintaining high safety standards, underlining the audience's essential role in the aviation community. We believe that the findings can be an important tool to be used in training personnel to understand and monitor risk factors. We will also discuss how “just culture” can be developed and maintained, using the example from the Royal Norwegian Air Force Community, but hopefully, it will be relevant for other organizations concerned with risk handling and training. A framework for use in training concerning safety will be presented.

Keywords:

Technology Education, Training, Development.