Aviation

The Environment and Changing Behaviours

Project Overview

In a society which is looking to change human behaviours for envionrmental benefit, Transport for London (TfL) wanted to understand how people travelling to work could be helped to change from using their car to utilising public transport.  Using the science of psychology and the collection of real-world data we worked with a large organisation to understand the individual reasoning behind why employees used either car or public transport to get to work.  Barriers to changing behaviour were varied - including deeply held emotions, perception of public transport users and practical issues such as taking children to school and the ease of parking at the work premises. 

As important to understanding why people are reluctant to change is understanding what induces change and how to retain change on a long term basis.  Incentives for change were tested including perceptions of how others in the organisation travelled to work, free personal travel advice and travel cards. 

Other key issues to preventing change were found such as how travel information is presented and the differences between experienced public transport users and those who had rarely used public transport. Barriers and incentives for short term and long term change were identified and suitable methods for change suggested.

 

Control Room Ops

Project Overview

Across many industries control room functionality is sometimes assumed to have the same purpose - mainly associated with security and safety.   However many factors can affect control rooms and what their operators are able to deliver when technology, human limitations and organisations processes and procedures are taken into account.  An airside control room was reviewed to understand what could be detected by the technology, the operating staff and the effects of organisation processes and procedures from a security operations standpoint. The measure was to understand the ability of the control room operator to see and understand safety and security issues. The effects of such things as work overload, contact between control room operators and on-ground security staff and the influence of introducing differing technologies and work over time outside a typical control room function were considered.

Preventing Crashes Through Knowledge

Project Overview

Preventing crashes needs informed understanding of previous incidents to understand what happened, why, and how to use information to prevent incidents reoccurring. This project considered issues surrounding databases in general terms and the clients specific database and why they might not give good information on which to make decisions about resources and spend.  The database was considered using psychological research in order to inform how humans make decisions, reason and problem solve, how we interpret data and the influence of biases. Form fields within the database and their presentation and requirements were also considered, as was the collection of accurate causation rather than phenomena of incidents. Immediate, medium and long term recommendations were made.

Communicating Danger and Risk in Airside Operations

Project Overview

Working airside is acknowledged as one of the most dangerous environments to work in.  This project was to understand the most effective way to deliver airside safety messages so that are read, understood, trusted and complied with. The project uncovered a number of factors affecting why safety communications may be ignored, unnoticed or mistrusted. Using the science of warning communications, the data gained from both employer and employees, and measuring the differences that existed in differing airside sites were used to inform and deliver new warning designs to airside operations.

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