Dead Reckoning

Air Traffic Control, System Effects, and Risk

Diane Vaughan

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780226796543
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Vaughan unveils the complicated and high-pressure world of air traffic controllers as they navigate technology and political and public climates, and shows how they keep the skies so safe. When two airplanes were flown into the World Trade Center towers on September 11, 2001, Americans watched in uncomprehending shock as first responders struggled to react to the situation on the ground. Congruently, another remarkable and heroic feat was taking place in the air: more than six hundred and fifty air traffic control facilities across the country coordinated their efforts to ground four thousand flights in just two hours—an achievement all the more impressive considering the unprecedented nature of the task.In Dead Reckoning, Diane Vaughan explores the complex work of air traffic controllers, work that is built upon a close relationship between human organizational systems and technology and is remarkably safe given the high level of risk. Vaughan observed the distinct skill sets of air traffic controllers and the ways their workplaces changed to adapt to technological developments and public and political pressures. She chronicles the ways these forces affected their jobs, from their relationships with one another and the layouts of their workspace to their understanding of their job and its place in society. The result is a nuanced and engaging look at an essential role that demands great coordination, collaboration, and focus—a role that technology will likely never be able to replace. Even as the book conveys warnings about complex systems and the liabilities of technological and organizational innovation, it shows the kinds of problem-solving solutions that evolved over time and the importance of people.

Part I

Beginnings

1

Dead Reckoning

Reckoning, according to the dictionary, is a cognitive activity: an act or instance of taking into account, calculating, estimating. Dead reckoning is a navigational term that has these cognitive processes at its core. It refers to a procedure that attempts to locate something in space or time by deduction—that is, unaided by direct observation or direct evidence—and thus the original term, ded reckoning. The historical origin of dead reckoning is in early marine navigation. Unable to identify their location by direct observation or in relation to familiar landmarks, early mariners developed methods of observing and recording their position, distances and directions traveled, and currents of wind and water. The purpose was to calculate where their vessel was, to compare progress with a predetermined route, and to correct for any deviations. For many centuries, navigators relied on the positions and motions of sun and stars and direction of winds for their direction finding. The calculative, intuitive, and cognitive aspects of dead reckoning dominated navigational practice; material technologies were absent.

But gradually, the cognitive and the technological began to merge in navigation. Marine charts, maps, the compass, and devices for measuring speed and distance were among the earliest material technologies for sea navigation. They enabled navigators not only to plot where a craft was but also to predict where it would be at given time. But technological advance notwithstanding, mistake was endemic, due to calculation errors based on using these early devices. With the invention of the airplane in the early twentieth century, human cognition and material technologies have merged in both air and sea navigation, the changes driven by the continuing assumption that increasing the sophistication of the technology will improve the accuracy of measurement and prediction, reduce mistakes, and therefore increase safety.

Now, in the twenty-first century, dead reckoning has even broader meaning. The amount of traffic, the amount and complexity of the technology, and the institutional and organizational contexts of navigation have changed dramatically. So have the goals: dead reckoning includes not only selection of the course, staying on it, and avoiding collision but also mandates to achieve cost efficiency by minimizing fuel consumption and adhering to a predetermined schedule. Moreover, dead reckoning occurs at the organizational and system levels, as administrators estimate and calculate in order to track, predict, and be responsive to changing demands and resources. Counting and measurement dominate, as science and technology are deployed in the interest of accuracy, safety, and efficiency, as well as the survival of the organizational system itself.

This book explores dead reckoning in air traffic control in the early twenty-first century. The central puzzle is, what makes air traffic control so safe? Although the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the agency responsible for regulating air traffic in the United States, has been repeatedly castigated by Congress and the press for inefficiencies, costly technologies, congestion, and delays, the FAA’s air traffic control system, responsible for the management of airplane movement on the ground and in the sky, nonetheless has a surprisingly positive safety record. Failures, in the form of accidents and collisions for commercial airlines, are a rarity. When these occur, most often they are due to pilot error or technical failure. In contrast to commercial airlines, accidents are frequent in general aviation, where pilots are not typically trained to be professional pilots, are less experienced, and fly in uncontrolled airspace. However, the safety record of air traffic control for commercial aviation is impressive.

In light of this safety record, the continuing cries from critics to increase safety by increasing reliance on automation and decreasing the number of air traffic controllers doesn’t make sense. Historically, arguments for reducing the number of controllers have rested on the notion that with better technology, safety can be preserved and efficiency (read: cutting costs, meeting schedules) increased. However, insufficient numbers of controllers mean tired controllers, and tired controllers means errors. Automation, yes—the high volume of traffic calls for the best technology possible. But to reduce controllers, or, as some have even argued, replace them with technology? We had powerful evidence of controllers’ importance during the September 11 terrorist attacks when, in an unprecedented situation, one unimagined in their training, technologies, or system design, air traffic controllers nationwide cleared the sky of over four thousand airplanes in a little over two hours. Without them, it would have been an even greater tragedy.

Although the failures of the FAA have been publicly derided, the contribution of the FAA’s air traffic control system and its controllers have never been isolated and identified. To discover why air traffic control is so safe, this book narrows in on controllers, and on the cognitive, technical, and material practices that they acquire during their training and deploy in everyday air traffic and emergencies. It takes into account the relationship between controllers and their technologies, how controllers give them meaning, repurpose them, and change them to fit the local situation, and also the reverse, or how the technologies, architecture, and socially organized arrangements of the control room affect controllers’ work.1 Equally important, answering the question of what makes air traffic control so safe also demands a focus on the large, complex socio-technical system in which the work is done. The sociologist Robert Merton observed that all systems of social action produce unanticipated consequences: they can be positive or negative.2 Robert Jervis, writing about political systems, warned that the characteristics of a system are different from—not greater than—the sum of its parts, so that looking at only the individual parts and their relations with one another misses the essence of the system and its effects.3 Merton and Jervis both stressed that despite the variation in the interconnectedness of system parts, they will always react to one another, producing unintended consequences.

Pursuing this line of thinking, Charles Perrow, in his 1984 Normal Accidents, identified the error-inducing characteristics of high-risk technical systems, arguing that the complexity and tight coupling of the technical system’s parts produce unavoidable, unanticipated negative consequences: hence, the normal accident.4 His emphasis is on the interaction of complex structures and the inevitability of failure. In Perrow’s schema, the air traffic control system, although complex and tightly coupled, ranks as a low risk technical system. Other scholars have gone further, identifying air traffic control as an error-reducing system. In recognition of its safety achievements, they have described the air traffic control system as an exemplar of a high-reliability organization.5 To understand what makes high-reliability organizations so safe, these scholars have primarily examined the social psychology and interactions of small groups engaged in risky work: airline cockpit crews, workers on aircraft carrier flight decks, wildland firefighting crews, to name a few.6

These social psychological studies have yielded many important lessons about how small work groups make sense of situations and coordinate activities that have been relevant to improving safety in many other kinds of organizations. However, for the most part, studies of high-reliability organizations have purposely isolated workers from the larger socio-technical system and its institutional environment in order to better explore the dynamics of individual interactions and collective understanding in a group.7 For example, one study focused on teamwork on an aircraft carrier flight deck when a flight comes in but left air force budgets and resources unquestioned.8 How political conditions and social actors in the institutional environment affected the resources available for training and recruitment practices affected the work and work conditions on the flight deck were not part of the study.

Research on how large-scale socio-technical systems affect the interpretations and meanings in small-group interactions of people doing risky technical work has rarely been done.9 Moreover—and surprisingly—although technology is central to research on normal accidents and high reliability, neither scholarship from science and technology studies nor workplace studies that locate human-technology interactions in the socially organized activities and physical settings of their use have been incorporated into the research of either specialty.10 The rule that a change in one part of a complex system will affect other parts in unanticipated ways generally holds true. How has air traffic control, operating under similar political and economic pressures as the other large-scale socio-technical systems that Perrow defined as more risky, managed to avoid these same deleterious effects—or has it?

My approach deviates from both previous approaches by studying controllers, their technology, and work practices within the larger social context in which they are located. I use system effects to mean the dynamic relationship between conditions, events, and social actors in the institutional environment as they impact the air traffic control system, its organization and technology, and so change it, and how, in turn, the air traffic control system impacts the work and experiences of the people who do the technical work. This includes their reactions, as they change, confirm, or contest system effects. Therefore, to understand the inner workings of air traffic control, it is also necessary to explore the system through its history, politics, and the problem-solving social actors both externally and internally that have formed, re-formed, and constrained it.11

Consequently, this book goes beyond previous work by focusing on the ongoing relationship between history, institutions, organizations, and the social, technological, and material arrangements that constitute controllers’ everyday practices in work settings. Necessarily, I combine historical ethnography with interviews, archival research, and surveys in order to capture system dynamics over time and social space: the past, the time of the study, and now. The substantive contribution of this book is to identify the essential characteristics of this error-reducing system of air traffic control. In a challenge to advocates for the cost-efficiency and safety gains of maximum automation, this book reveals the liabilities of technological innovation and argues for the importance of people. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are considerable.

By embracing history, the book captures the changing nature of organizations, technologies, and work. The idea that an organization’s fate is tied to its institutional environment—its origin, evolution, persistence or demise, capacities and vulnerabilities—is well studied and accepted. We also know that both institutions and organizations are created, changed, and constrained by heterogeneous social actors, which has consequences for an organization’s structure, technology, performance, its people, and their work. Therefore, the focus throughout this book is on the air traffic control system, standardized and rule-embedded, within its historical shifting political, cultural, technological, and economic environment, exposing the impact on both everyday work and the workplace, as well as the responses of problem-solving individuals to contingency and the unanticipated consequences—both positive and negative—that result. As a result, the book illuminates our understanding of institutions of all kinds: their emergence, transformation, and technologies, and the effects of those things on the people who work there.12

To a great extent, we can think of all organizational systems as engaged in dead reckoning: internally preoccupied with predicting their own future positions in social space and time in relation to the positions of other organizations in their environment by deduction—unaided by direct observation or direct evidence. The analysis elaborates theories of boundaries and boundary work, showing how systems and their boundaries are created, how they expand over time, their permeability and stubborn resistance, and the difficulty of crossing those boundaries.13 In the workplace, the book opens to full view the effects of system changes on intraorganizational structure, culture, cognition, meaning making, and everyday work practice. Thus, it builds upon workplace studies that examine technologies to support cooperative work that requires coordination between multiple users across time and social space.14 In addition, it reveals the role of organizational systems in the production of professional expertise, showing how the problem-solving and material practices in the workplace are affected by institutional, organizational actors and factors outside the control room.

The case demonstrates the complexities of modernizing: the ramifications of advancing from simple to complex—here, from flags to “shrimp boats” to radar to automation—for designing and implementing technological infrastructures for large information spaces,15 as well as for small spaces to carry out coordinated, technologically mediated or assisted work.16 As more complex specialized technologies were developed for air traffic control, they had to be adapted and embedded in an aging socio-technical system, fitting not only into the workspace but also locating the necessary technological infrastructure into the existing organization structure. Repeatedly, the design and implementation of technological innovations created tensions between the standardization of the system and the need to customize to local situations. This same problem plagues many organizations that are currently challenged to keep up by patching the new onto the existing organization and technologies.

Finally, the relevance of this case extends to concerns about technology as the medium of transnational connection in a global society and the future of work in an age when competition drives a need for greater speed, accuracy, and efficiency through automation. Complex organizational systems are dynamic, processual, and unpredictable, so in spite of planning, outcomes are fraught with unanticipated consequences, both positive and negative.17 This book shows that the old and the new do not readily mesh, causing lag in responses to changing external conditions and unanticipated consequences for the socio-technical system and for the people who work in it. For the complex systems of today, Arthur Stinchcombe’s writing about the liabilities of technological and organizational innovation rings true.18 Moreover, this book reveals how, in the short run, an organization can reproduce its flaws even when trying its utmost to change in order to survive a major crisis. At the same time that it conveys warnings, however, the book demonstrates the agency of the workforce in maintaining the viability of the systems that they inhabit. Incrementally, problem-solving people and organizations inside the air traffic control system have developed strategies of resilience, reliability, and redundancy that provided perennial dynamic flexibility to the parts of the system structure, and they have improvised tools of repair to adjust innovations to local conditions, contributing to system persistence.

Why Air Traffic Control?

I came to this project after studying how and why things went wrong in organizations. I had completed three books on the topic. The first involved a computer crime in which one organization defrauded another, the second looked at how intimate relationships come apart, and the third explored the causes of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s flawed decision to launch the space shuttle Challenger.19 During a long-term project of developing explanations by analogical comparison—looking for similaritie...