Experiments on Language Errors in Aviation Maintenance

Abstract

The Federal Aviation Administration has raised many issues concerning the outsourcing of maintenance to foreign repair stations and recommends establishing a method for determining whether language barriers result in maintenance deficiencies. This work addresses concerns that non-native English speakers may be prone to an increased error rate that could potentially affect airworthiness. This paper presents Year 2 of the project. We used the seven scenarios of language error developed in Year 1 as the basis for our data collection effort to quantify the frequency of error. An intervention experiment has been designed and tested on two groups of participants: English-speaking maintenance personnel and Chinese speaking engineering graduate students. Neither is the final target group, but the methodology needed to be verified before on-site data collection. The analysis of the data from these two experiments is presented here.