The Development of a Measure to Assess Perceptions of the Advanced Aircraft Training Climate

Abstract

Training attitudes and airline pilots’ specific learning experiences are antecedents, which affect human behavior on the flight deck in various ways. This article reports on the development and psychometric evaluation of a scale to assess aviators’ perceptions of the training environment associated with technologically complex advanced aircraft. A sample of 229 airline pilots provided data to explore the latent structure of the hypothesized research construct. Principal axis factor analysis produced a 3-factor model consisting of organizational professionalism, intrinsic motivation, and individual control of training outcomes, with highly acceptable Cronbach’s alpha reliability coefficients.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This study was part of a research project conducted by Dr. P. Naidoo, supervised by Professors Leopold P. Vermeulen and Pieter Schaap at the University of Pretoria, South Africa.