Personality aspects of involvement in pilot-error accidents

The consistently high frequency of pilot-error accidents in both military and civilian aviation programs does much to support exploratory research which might help alleviate the problem. Cattell's Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire (16 PF), Mehrabian Achievement Scale, and a dynamic decision making task (under risk) were given to 51 Army aviators. Accident files were then examined in order to classify the aviators as to their prior pilot-error accident involvement. Stepwise discriminant analyses revealed that the decision-making task scores and the achievement scores were unrelated to the pilot error accident groupings while the 16 PF scores were able to correctly classify 86% of the aviators as to whether or not they had been previously listed as a cause factor in a military aviation accident.