An Airline Checklist Use as a Sociomaterial Practice D.Soc.Sc. Petra Auvinen Professor Ilkka Arminen School of Social Sciences and Humanities Department of Social Research University of Tampere, Finland University of Helsinki, Finland petra.auvinen(at)uta.fi iarminen(at)mappi.helsinki.fi Abstract Checklists form the basis of procedural standardization in the airline cockpit, with the help of which safety-critical measures become a routine part of flight crew task management. In this paper, we discuss the normal checklist use and its problems as a socio- material practice. We show how routine problems in checklist use are resolved, and point out how procedural and interactive backups function in action, thereby securing flight safety. We also examine the nature of problems in the checklist use that occur within the performance of individual checklists, within the order between checklists, and within the order between the checklist performance and other flight task activities. The problem types include premature, absent and excessive actions. The problems within checklists reveal troubles in the cognitive ergonomics of task design and logics of checklist use. The order problems between checklists appear as cognitive mis- performances, though cognitive overloading may have organizational grounds. 1. Introduction The checklists form the basis of procedural standardization in the airline cockpit, with the help of which safety-critical measures become a standardized routine part of flight crew task management. In the Airbus 320 flown by the participant pilots, the task management during flight phases is assisted with eight normal checklists: before engine start, after engine start, taxi, takeoff, approach, final, parking and securing. In addition, there are abnormal and emergency checklists (the use of which is not studied here). The normal checklists are listed in one document that works as a procedural backup assisting the routinization of safety- critical performance of flight tasks. The routinization of safety-critical activities, however, seems to entail a paradox as the checklist performances are prone to recurring errors. In our data from simulated Airbus 320 flights, there occurred 12 documented errors during the performance of 122 normal checklists within 26, 5 hours flight time. Therefore, there occurred an error for every two flight hours. The errors in the performance of normal checklists do not largely seem to consist of verbal misunderstandings or any kinds of language problems. In other words, the checklist performance do not suffer from hearing, speaking or understanding difficulties (only 1 error), but problems of different sort. The checklist problems seem to be related to the use of an airline checklist document as a socio-material practice, in which talk, visual and material actions are interlinked in an ongoing interaction. The airline pilots’ situated understanding of the phase of flight and its tasks is maintained and updated in the document use. Therefore, the problems in the checklist use are not as such troublesome, but help to maintain and update pilots’ mutual awareness, thereby enhancing safety [1], [2] and [3]. The pilots’ repairs, remedies and reminders with the help of which they amend problems of checklist use form a second order interactive backup that helps to maintain the orderly performance of flight tasks. The checklists in use and the problems in their usage open a view to cockpit interaction in which talk, action and technologies are interwoven. We explore the document use as a multimodal action composed of talk and physical actions embedded with procedural and interactive backups intertwining in the formation of action. In this paper, we discuss the normal checklist use and its problems as a socio-material practice [4]. We follow Suchman’s initiative, according to which humans and technologies are asymmetrically interdependent [5]. For Suchman, the asymmetrical interdependence derives from the ethnomethodological underpinnings of her original contribution [6], revised and republished in 2007 [5]. On the one hand, we show how routine problems in checklist use are resolved. We point out how procedural and interactive backups function and mutually elaborate each other in action, 2013 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 1530-1605/12 $26.00 © 2012 IEEE DOI 10.1109/HICSS.2013.80 1588 2013 46th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences 1530-1605/12 $26.00 © 2012 IEEE DOI 10.1109/HICSS.2013.80 1590