ABSTRACT

This essay will examine and classify the major air transportation safety related books and select journals on transportation safety and where appropriate, provide real world, practical illustrations of the theoretical concerns. The essay is primarily designed to educate aviation transportation safety practitioners and aviation university students on the broad outlines of the history, theory and practice of "safety management" in the United States. Several aviation safety trainees under the time-sensitive pressure of typical training programs have expressed the need for concise reference material that would provide a broad orientation and conceptual overview of the safety management discipline without having to resort to an entire shelf of books.' As such, Patterns In Safety Thinking: A Literature Guide To Air Transportation Safety, meets that requirement. Many of the textbooks and reports that were reviewed for this essay ranged in size from 260 pages to in excess of 600 pages. Within the confines of this survey, a full and comprehensive literature review to include scholarly journals is neither practical nor desirable. In part this would have resulted in an overly ambitious project that could easily exceed I ,500 pages--defeating the original purpose and intent of this essay, as well as the fact that not all of the risk management issues addressed by researchers are germane to aviation safety. The safety literature has drawn from among many disciplines including the behavioral and natural sciences and these incorporations are continuing to enrich its intellectual evolution and how we think about "safety management." As an educational supplement for engineering students, the essay may serve as a guide to stimulate interdisciplinary thinking about safety. The book may also partially meet public policy objectives to further educate air travelers about safety and further aviation safety risk communication. Transportation has an enormous impact on the U.S. economy. According to one estimate, in 1995, transportationrelated goods and services accounted for approximately 11 percent of United States Gross Domestic Product.2