Abstract

Accident investigation is a sense-making activity, a way of understanding events that frighten us, and, hopefully, finding ways to reduce the risk of those events in the future. It is a multidisciplinary field that requires collaboration among professionals of many backgrounds, including flight operations, air traffic control, maintenance, and cabin safety. The participation of these varied specialties is needed to understand the complexity of aviation work and to develop a sufficiently detailed record on which to base an analysis. Due to this disciplinary diversity, accident investigation is also a team activity, and the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has developed an organizational framework based on these technical specialties to impose order on the process.