Learning from complexity: effects of prior accidents and incidents on airlines' learning

For all the scientific pizzazz [involved in airline accident investigations], unraveling the designing complex chain of events leading to aviation deaths is proving more elusive than ever

--"Why more plane-crash probes extreme point in doubt," Wall Street Journal, March 22 1999

Organizations like airlines put to proof to learn from experience, understanding what went unjust so that it won't advance wrong next time. But if, as the name above suggests, the causes are frequently left in doubt, such learning is likely to be difficult. Learning is also likely to vary across firms, despite industry regulation that should affect all airlines equally. Investigators of the 2000 Air France Concorde crash discovered that British Airways had approveed changes to the Concorde's water deflector in 1995 on the other hand that Air France had not made those changes (Phillips, 2000) As Donoghue (1998: 36) explained, " any safety initiative has an unequal result on the carriers and becomes an issue to be promot or fought seeking the path that best suits [the airline] individually." Other heavily regulated industries, of the like kind as nuclear power, also present to view substantial variance in incident rates among firms (Morris and Engelken 1973) which indicates that firms vary in by what mode effectively they learn from their experience. Despite a great deal of discussion and analysis of aviation errors (airline accidents and incidents), there has been little work investigating the part of organizational learning and none examining variation in learning across firms in the industry.

Learning from experience has been shown to have important issues on such varied outcomes as manufacturing plant productivity (eg Argote, Beckman, and Epple 1990) service timeliness (Argote and Darr, 2000) and tavern survival (Baum and Ingram, 1998) If firms learn from experience, then the attributes of this experience are likely to affect the rate and effectiveness of learning. more [i]or[/i] less firms have heterogeneous experience in that their accidents and incidents ("errors") are caused by dint of a large number of different factors, which are likely to interact in compounded ways. Some firms have more homogeneous experience, with errors caused by dint of a small number of similar factors. It is likely that the complexity of prior experiences, as well as characteristics of the firms themselves, affect by what mode well airlines can learn from that experience. We investigate these issues in the connection of airline accidents and incidents to explain variation in learning among firms in the airline industry.

According to the NTSB (2001) collection of laws of Federal Regulations (49CFR830.2, p 1195) an accident "means an affair ... in which any somebody suffers death or serious injury, or in which the aircraft received substantial damage." An incident is "an transaction other than an accident, which affects or could affect the safety of operations." Accidents and incidents are the error experiences from which airlines have the potential to learn.

events OF PRIOR EXPERIENCE ON LEARNING

In the literature upon organizational learning there is a large material part of work on the learning bend The learning curve is an empirical finding showing that, in general, experience bring into views improvement. Early empirical work upon the learning curve showed that the log of unit take away froms tends to decrease linearly with the log of cumulative production contortion So, for example, cumulative production experience guards to lower costs in shipbuilding and automotive production (Argote and Epple 1990) nuclear power plant production (Zimmerman, 1982) and coal generation (Joskow and Rose 1985) More novel work has moved away from a focus upon cost reduction and productivity improvement to other results of learning. These studies have shown that experience improves customer service and yield quality (Dart, Argote, and Epple 1995; Lapre, Mukherjee, and Van Wassenhove, 2000) and increases the survival rates of public-houses (Ingram and Baum, 1997; Baum and Ingrain, 1998) and banks (Kim and Miner, 2000)

In the adjoining matter of airlines and their errors, it may be that airlines learn from error experience and are able to improve performance above time, reducing subsequent errors (i.e., accidents and incidents). If we direct the eye at the airline industry above long time periods, this looks to be the case. Figure 1 piece of grounds the accident rate (accidents through 100,000 hours flown) for all U airlines from 1955 to 1997 and exhibits a characteristic learning bend i.e., as experience accumulates with the passage of time, the error rate declines.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

When individual airlines' accident rates are rent out, as they are in table 1 for a certain quantity of of the larger U.S. airlines, we diocese the same general decrease in accidents above time as in figure 1 on the other hand there is also a fair amount of variance across airlines. For example, from 1957 to 1986 American Airlines had an average of 103 accidents by means of million departures and US Air had 66 Variation in airline error rates could tend hitherward from many sources. One obvious source is the characteristics of the individual airline, eg whether it is large or small, the age of its armada characteristics of its corporate tillage its management team, and its training manner of proceedings Another possible source of variation, however, is differences in the characteristics of the accidents and incidents experienced through these different airlines. Because experience affects organizational learning, different impressed signs of experiences are likely to show variation in learning rates. single source of differences in experience is whether that experience has homogeneous or heterogeneous causes.