Culture plays an important role in people's safety behaviours but has received relatively little empirical attention in the literature on helicopter operations. Professional, national and organisational cultures are underlined as vital input factors in Helmreich's model of team performance model, affecting performance functions and outcomes. Our early research indicates that military-trained pilots are perceived to be more risk taking, whereas civilian-trained helicopter pilots are described as risk-averse. Risk-taking is generally made up of two components: being able to perceive the risk and deciding whether to proceed with the risks involved. In our previous study it was found that there is no difference in risk perception between military- and civilian-trained helicopter pilots.

Thus, we aimed to examine whether there is a difference between military- and civilian-trained pilots in their risk tolerance.

In this study you were asked to read landing scenarios, make judgments related to their risk level and whether you or another pilot would proceed with landing, fill out Domain-Specific Risk-Taking (Blais & Weber, 2006) questionnaire, as well as providing some demographic information.

The anonymous data gathered in the study will be kept on a password protected PC.

Please ask any questions you might have or discuss any concerns with Ms Anna Kaminska (postgraduate researcher) or Dr Amy Irwin (supervisor) in the School of Psychology, University of Aberdeen by emailing a.kaminska.19@abdn.ac.uk (Anna) or a.irwin@abdn.ac.uk (Amy).

Thank you again for taking time to participate in our study!

If you'd like to read more on the topic, here is our recent conference paper:

Kaminska, A., Irwin, A., Ray, D., & Flin, R. (2021, June). Pilot is a Pilot is a Pilot?: Exploration of Effects of Professional Culture in Helicopter Pilots. In Congress of the International Ergonomics Association (pp. 682-690). Springer, Cham.