ABSTRACT
Whenever you fly an aircraft, either sitting in the cockpit or back in the passenger cabin, land at a “foreign” airport and your flight safety is likely to be at the mercy of macroergonomic considerations. These considerations include systematic incorporation of cultural factors in work system design and operation. The above succinct epigraph, which provides the first compelling reason, is also a testament to this contention. It may be anathema to many scholars and practitioners of “hard” sciences and other engineering-dominated fields, but recent rigorous research has proven that even scientific theories, facts, and
practices-that determine and govern aviation systems’ operations-are strongly culturally based.
