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- 22 - A content analysis of the answers of Civil Aeronautics Administration Examiners and Company Check-Piolts to the question, "When you check a pilot, what are the things you particularly look for which you feel differentiate a good airline pilot from a poor one?", produced 234 specific things which they said they particularly looked for. Of these, only 74, or 34%, had to do with pilot behavior which was previously found to be most critical from the standpoint of contributing to critical situations and accidents. This is shown in Table 6. The four most frequently mentioned kinds of behavior which they look for, representing 80% of all those mentioned, are kinds of behavior which are not even among the first eight most critical components of the pilot's job, as determined from the analyses of critical incidents and accidents (see Table 3). When the airline pilots were asked what were the factors contributing to making airline flying less safe then it should be, some of them felt that poor piloting was an important factor. Of 1,241 comments of airline pilots as to causes of unsafe airline flying, 9%, or 115 comments, were related to poor pilot behavior. Table 7 shows how these 115 comments were distributed in categories of poor pilot behavior. Many of the kinds of behavior are similar to those previously found to be contributing to critical situations and accidents. Nevertheless, the most critical job component, as determined from the analyses of critical incidents and accidents, was mentioned by only one pilot; the next most critical was not mentioned by a single pilot. Additional information pertaining to critical pilot behavior and knowledge was obtained from the study of the personnel files of eliminated pilots and their controls. A comparison was made between matched pairs of the E-group and C-group pilots as to ratings of pilot behavior on certain phases of the last recorded flight check administered to each experimental pilot before elimination and an identical flight check administered to his matched control pilot within plus or minus two months of the other check. Most of the paired pilots had received ratings on a three-point scale corresponding to "Above Average," "Average," and "Below Average." A few had received ratings on a four-point scale; "Excellent," "Good," "Fair," and "Poor." After an examination of the distribution of ratings on the four-point scale, it was decided to convert these ratings to the three-point scale as follows: "Excellent" and "Good" ratings were considered "Above Average," "Fair" ratings were considered "Average," and "Poor" ratings were considered "Below Average." A score of 3 was assigned to "Above Average" ratings, 2 to "Average" ratings, and 1 to "Below Average" ratings. The mean differences between ratings of the matched pairs on each category of pilot behavior are shown in Table 8. This table shows which of the various job components differentiate the E-group from the C-group, hence are critical components of the airline pilot's job. All of these components with the exception of "Knowledge of Mechanical Details" differentiate between the two groups significantly. When an average grade was computed for each pilot in both groups on all of the items rated on these flight checks, it, too, was found to differentiate the E-group from the C-group at the 1% level of significance (t = 7.014 with 82 degrees of freedom). Included with the items shown in Table 8 were six items relating to pilot traits, all of which went into making up this average flight check score. These six items relating to traits will be discussed subsequently in the section on critical pilot traits and characteristics. Nevertheless, it can be concluded that the average flight check score and also practically all of the components
