A recent study published in Aviation Psychology and Applied Human Factors suggests that a flight instructor’s personality and their school’s safety culture are strong predictors of their on-the-job safety behaviors. The findings provide evidence that highly organized and responsible instructors tend to strictly follow safety protocols, especially when their flight schools prioritize safety. These insights offer new ways for flight schools to hire and train instructors to reduce aviation accidents.
Researchers Vivek Sharma and Meredith Carroll conducted this study to understand the human factors that influence safety during flight training. Between 2015 and 2023, the National Transportation Safety Board recorded over 1,600 accidents related to flight instruction in the United States. Nearly ten percent of these accidents were fatal. Previous accident reports suggest that poor decision-making and unsafe behaviors are common causes of these crashes.
Sharma, a division director, chair of online programs, and assistant professor at the College of Aeronautics at the Florida Institute of Technology, wanted to investigate these human elements. “Since childhood, I have always been inspired by teachers, and I firmly believe that teachers have a very strong influence on students,” Sharma said. “While pursuing my master’s degree in aviation safety, I was introduced to personality traits theory and its influence on human performance and behaviors.”
Unlike commercial pilots, flight instructors must balance teaching student pilots while simultaneously maintaining control of the aircraft and ensuring safety. “Because flight instructors are also teachers, they play a critical role in shaping next generation aviators’ performance and safety attitudes,” Sharma explained. “Therefore, I felt examining the relationship between flight instructors’ personality traits and their safety behaviors is important and may help flight schools better understand the role of flight instructors’ personality traits in influencing safety behaviors.”
While many experts have studied the personalities of pilots in general, very little research has focused specifically on flight instructors. Sharma and Carroll proposed a model looking at three main areas: personality traits, emotional or cognitive attitudes, and the safety climate of the flight school.
To measure personality, the authors used the Big Five personality model. This well-known psychological framework categorizes human personality into five main traits: extraversion, agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism. Extraversion refers to being outgoing, while agreeableness describes being cooperative. Openness involves a willingness to try new things, conscientiousness reflects how organized and responsible a person is, and neuroticism refers to emotional instability or a tendency to experience negative emotions easily.
The second area of focus involved what psychologists call the affective domain, which refers to a person’s feelings and attitudes. For this study, the researchers looked at self-efficacy and risk perception. Self-efficacy is a person’s belief in their own ability to succeed in specific situations or accomplish a task. Risk perception is how a person views the severity and likelihood of a dangerous situation.
The third area was the safety climate of the flight school itself. Safety climate refers to how employees perceive their organization’s commitment to safety based on its policies, procedures, and management practices. The researchers wanted to know if a school with strict safety rules and supportive leadership naturally encouraged better safety behaviors from its instructors.
To gather their data, Sharma and Carroll used an online survey to collect responses from certificated flight instructors working in the United States. They recruited participants from a professional flight instructor organization and various flight training schools. A total of 134 flight instructors completed all sections of the survey. The sample included 116 male instructors and 17 female instructors, with one participant choosing not to report their biological sex.
On average, the female participants had over 3,000 flight hours, while the male participants averaged over 6,000 flight hours. The instructors also came from different working environments. Roughly forty-three percent of the participants worked at less strictly regulated flight schools, while about twenty-five percent worked at highly structured, federally approved flight programs. The remaining participants operated independently as freelance instructors.
The survey asked participants to complete five separate questionnaires to measure the targeted variables. First, the researchers used a standard twenty-item personality test to measure the Big Five personality traits. Participants rated how accurately certain statements described them on a five-point scale. Next, they took an eight-item test to measure self-efficacy, answering questions about their confidence in overcoming challenges.
To measure risk perception, the flight instructors completed a thirteen-item questionnaire that asked them to rate the danger level of specific flying scenarios. The survey also included an eighteen-item test to gauge the safety climate of each instructor’s flight school. This section asked participants to rate statements about how well their management understood operational issues and maintained safety standards. Finally, the researchers measured the main outcome, safety behavior, using a six-item scale that assessed how strictly the instructors complied with safety regulations and participated in safety programs.
When the researchers analyzed the data, they found that conscientiousness was a significant predictor of safety behaviors. Instructors who scored high in conscientiousness reported much higher levels of safety compliance. This makes sense from a psychological perspective, as conscientious people tend to be proactive, thorough, and highly responsible.
“The findings did not surprise me, as they were consistent with previous research,” Sharma noted. “Flight instructors scored high on conscientiousness, agreeableness, and low on neuroticism. This indicated that the majority of the flight instructors are responsible, duty minded, goal-oriented, capable of empathizing with student pilots and emotionally stable. These results were consistent with commercial pilots.”
The analysis also revealed that the flight school’s safety climate had a major impact on safety behaviors. Instructors who felt that their management prioritized safety policies were much more likely to exhibit positive safety behaviors themselves. When a flight school’s leadership actively promotes a strong safety culture, the instructors tend to adopt those same values during their training flights.
Interestingly, the researchers did not find a significant relationship between self-efficacy and safety behavior. A flight instructor’s confidence in their own abilities did not seem to dictate whether they followed safety protocols. Similarly, risk perception did not turn out to be a significant predictor in this specific model. The overall results indicate that an instructor’s natural sense of responsibility and the school’s safety culture are the main drivers of safe flying practices.
“The findings suggest that aviation safety is not only influenced by technical flying skills, but also by human factors such as personality traits and organizational culture,” Sharma said. “This means that flight schools may benefit from emphasizing safety culture, safety training, and potentially considering personality characteristics during hiring and training processes.”
While the findings offer helpful insights, there are a few potential limitations to keep in mind. The study relied on a self-reported online survey, which means participants might have rated their own safety behaviors more highly than they actually behave in real life. The researchers also used a general safety behavior scale rather than a test designed specifically for the unique tasks of a flight instructor.
Sharma cautioned against oversimplifying the results. “The findings should not be interpreted to mean that personality traits alone determine whether a flight instructor will behave safely, as safety behaviors are influenced by multiple operational, environmental, and organizational factors,” he explained.
The sample size of 134 participants is relatively small when compared to the tens of thousands of active flight instructors in the country. The variations in the types of flight schools where the participants worked could also influence the data. Some instructors worked for highly structured programs, while others operated independently as freelance instructors. These different working environments likely feature vastly different safety climates.
The authors suggest that future research should test these theories using larger and more diverse samples of pilots. They recommend exploring how personality traits affect safety behaviors in airline pilots, military pilots, and student pilots. A major goal for future studies would be to develop a specific safety behavior scale tailored entirely to the aviation field.
Sharma is also looking to expand this research into emerging areas of aviation. “My long-term goal is to better understand the personality traits of Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) pilots or drone pilots,” Sharma said. “As the commercial usage of drones is rapidly expanding in various sectors, it is critical to understand the human factors associated with UAS operators.”
He hopes to identify how individual differences influence decision-making, risk perception, and operational performance among drone operators. “These findings can support the development of a future UAS workforce by providing more effective training and selection criteria,” Sharma added.
The study, “Investigating Flight Instructors’ Safety Behaviors Through Personality Traits, Affective Domain, and Safety Climate in the United States,” was authored by Vivek Sharma and Meredith Carroll.