The data-driven pilot and the risk of personal sensitivity to a negative outcome

The past decade has seen a gradual mistrust of the human-centric decision-making approaches with both researchers and practitioners advocating an increased use of data-driven decision making to lower decision-making risk. This is seen as vital in the aviation field with one of the greatest risks to passenger safety being errors in pilot decision making. Although the introduction of information systems has attempted to lower the risk of fatal crashes, human decision-making is still required. This article seeks to understand if a pilot will oscillate between human-centric decision-making approaches and information system based decision-making approaches. A case study approach was iteratively built to investigate this phenomenon. From this case study, the emergent theme of an individual’s personal sensitivity to a negative outcome is presented and discussed. The implications of these themes for information systems and the associated risks in the aviation field are then presented.