ABSTRACT
Complex mobility hubs such as airports provide an excellent environment and context for understanding, experiencing and acting upon safety-related issues that manifest within a socio-technical system setting. At the same time, they facilitate, and often demand, a variety of different interactions among people from different backgrounds, roles, goals and expertise. This chapter unfolds one success and one failure ethnographic-oriented story. Both stories refer to safety-related incidents that took place during the author's work within a project looking at airport travel and particularly on passenger experiences. Safety by experience and democratisation of safety-related experiences between all airport-related stakeholders could offer new perspectives in understanding and applying safety principles in complex systems. Airports as complex mobility ecosystems do not only consist of engineering systems in the traditional sense. They rather constitute an amalgamation of different types of services and technologies, some of which are not integrated with each other; however, all contribute to what we call passenger experience.
