Abstract:

Risk management is an essential skill for pilots in the modern aviation flight, due to the fact that the aviation flight is a high risky activity. By analyzing the similarity and difference between pilots' risk perception and drivers' risk perception, we summarized and discussed the mechanism of processing and affected factors, which would predict the possibility of the involvement of flight accidents and safety operation behaviors of the pilots in advance, thus the aviation risks would be prevented. This paper summarized the risk perception of pilots from two aspects. Firstly, the factors that influenced the risk perception of pilots were summarized. The pilots' risk perception was influenced by three aspects including the flight environment, the characteristics of pilots and the organizational culture. The flight environment consisted of the external environment and the aircraft.The characteristics of pilots included age, flight experiences, gender, attitudes and personality traits such as cognitive styles and control points. And the trend of pilots' risk perception demonstrated an "inverted U curve" with the increase of age and flight experiences. In addition, the safety culture of enterprises, the CRM and the information sharing and exchanging between the pilots and the ATCs also had impacts on pilots' risk perception. Secondly, we discussed the processing mechanism of the pilots' risk perception. The results indicated that the pilots' risk perception was a three-stage process which included risk identification, risk assessment and behavior tendency. Not only should a pilot identify the risk of the external environment about the flight situation and the malfunction of the aircraft itself, but also the pilot should assess correctly the risk value he recognizes from the external environment and the flight capacity of the pilot himself, and make preparations for the flight decision-making. However, pilots often confronted immediate risks from the dynamic flight environment, which would lead to the needs of updating and recognizing the risk stimulus information. Therefore, a combined pattern of the serial process and the parallel process was needed to handle the mechanism of risk perception of pilots. In the end, we concluded the deficiencies of these searches on processing mechanism and the affected factors of pilots' risk perception. First, age and the flight experiences were related to pilots' risk perception in "inverted U curve". However, we did not reach a general conclusion about the span range and the gradient of age and the flight experience. In the future study, researchers should investigate the subtle influence of experiences on pilots' risk perception whereby using the large data statistics and shortening the span range of age and the flight experience, thus a delicate diagram of the effect trend would be obtained. Second, in the future study, we should pay close attention to the influence of emotion on the pilots' risk perception. Especially in the positive emotion, pilots may have a high risk propensity and be inclined to fly from the visual meteorological conditions into the instrument meteorological conditions, which would result in the occurrence of the flight accidents. Finally, we do not get the empirical research conclusion about the pilots' risk perception model. In the future study, the processing mechanism of pilots' risk perception can be analyzed and understood further by making evidence-based researches, which provide the basis for the better risk management training.