Making sequentiality salient: and-prefacing in the talk of airline pilots MAURICE NEVILE UNIVERSITY OF CANBERRA ABSTRACT This article uses transcriptions from video recordings of airline pilots at work, on actual flights, to consider some locations and the interactional significance of a feature of routine talk in the airline cockpit: and-prefaced turns. As pilots’ work is formally organized for them as many discrete and ordered tasks, and-prefacing is a local means for maintaining an ongoing sense of their conduct of a flight as a whole. By and-prefacing their talk, pilots present some new talk or task as connected and relevantly next in a larger macro-sequence of work for their flight. And-prefacing is evidence of pilots’ orientation to a sense of sequence that can extend well beyond pairs of turns at talk and/or non-talk activities, or even a series of such paired sequences. It allows pilots to make salient the sequentiality of their work where the officially prescribed wordings they must use can leave this implicit. KEY WORDS : ‘and’, aviation, cockpit communication, conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, sequence organization Introduction This article is concerned with a means by which members of a particular profes- sional group, airline pilots, develop and maintain an ongoing sense of the coherence of their work: and-prefaced turns at talk. By prefacing turns with and pilots can present talk for a flight action, consisting of a sequence of turns at talk or even series of sequences of turns, as connected and relevantly next as yet another part in a larger sequence of actions. I examine some locations of and- prefacing in pilots’ routine talk and its interactional significance for making salient pilots’ orientation to the strictly sequential nature of their work. I argue that such an orientation may be valuable for, and constitutive of, the cockpit as a professional setting, for two reasons. First, pilots’ work is formally structured for them as discrete actions to be performed in a specified acceptable order. Second, ARTICLE 309 Discourse Studies Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications. (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com Vol 8(2): 309–332. 10.1177/1461445606061797