Hazardous Events and Accident Involvement by Military and Civilian Pilots

The Hazardous Events Scale (HES), a measure of involvement in potentially dangerous situations in aviation that do not lead to accidents, has been used as a surrogate for actual accident involvement in studies of risk taking and hazardous attitudes. However, no correlation between the HES and actual accident involvement has previously been published. In this research effort we developed an Army-specific version of the HES and administered it, over the course of 4 separate surveys, to a large sample of U.S. Army aviators. We then computed Army-HES scores that we correlated with self-reported accident involvement. We also reanalyzed data from 4 separate civilian studies in which the civilian version of the HES was administered to compute a correlation between HES and self-reported accident involvement. We hypothesized that a positive correlation would be obtained between the HES and accident involvement. That hypothesis was supported by the results. Positive, significant correlations were obtained for the Army sample (r = .15), and each of the 4 civilian studies (r = .23, r = .32, r = .24, r = .30) between the HES and self-reported accident involvement. The use of the HES as a surrogate measure for accident involvement and indicator of pilot accident risk for both individual pilots and organizations is discussed.