Occupational Safety and Reporting Guidance: Reviewing UAP Safety Events

Brief

Burstein, Pruchnicki, Jaeger, and Whiteley analyze UAP reporting failures through the lens of aviation occupational safety, drawing on human-factors methodology and existing airspace hazard-reporting literature. The paper identifies career-retaliation fear, institutional stigma, and the absence of standardized UAP-specific reporting channels as structural barriers that prevent pilots and aircrew from disclosing encounters. The authors position UAP events as occupational safety events, not anomalous curiosities, and argue they warrant the same systematic capture mechanisms as bird strikes or near-misses. Full-text extraction was unavailable; specific sample sizes, survey instruments, and quantitative findings cannot be confirmed from the editorial description alone.

Metadata

Category

Phenomenon

Venue

AIAA Aviation Forum and ASCEND 2024

Type

Conference proceedings

Year

2024

Authors

David Burstein, Shawn Pruchnicki, Jessie M. Jaeger, Iya Whiteley

DOI

10.2514/6.2024-3736

Access

Paywalled

Tags

UAP-safety, aviation-human-factors, occupational-safety, reporting-stigma, airspace-hazard

Key points

• The paper frames UAP encounters as occupational safety events within the context of civil and military aviation, bringing them under existing human-factors and hazard-reporting doctrine rather than treating them as a separate phenomenon.
• Professional stigma is identified as a primary structural barrier to UAP reporting by flight crews, paralleling documented under-reporting of other sensitive aviation incidents such as pilot fatigue and controlled-flight-into-terrain precursors.
• Existing aviation voluntary-reporting systems (e.g., NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System) are assessed for their adequacy in capturing UAP encounters; the paper finds them structurally insufficient for this event class.
• The multi-institutional authorship spans medicine (Rush University Medical Center), aviation safety engineering (Ohio State), and space-human-factors psychology (University College London), reflecting an intentionally cross-disciplinary approach.
• Detection challenges are addressed alongside reporting barriers, the paper notes that pilots may lack both the training and the instrument context to characterize UAP encounters with sufficient precision for safety analysis.
• The work was presented at AIAA Aviation Forum and ASCEND 2024, the primary professional society venue for aerospace engineering and aviation safety, lending it institutional visibility outside UAP-specific research channels.

Most interesting

• The paper's senior author roster bridges emergency medicine (Rush University Medical Center), aeronautical engineering safety (Ohio State), and astronaut/human-factors psychology (UCL), an institutional combination that has no direct precedent in prior UAP safety literature.
• By submitting to AIAA rather than a UAP-focused venue, the authors positioned UAP occupational safety as a mainstream aerospace engineering concern, exposing it to an audience of practitioners who set aviation safety standards.
• Shawn Pruchnicki's Ohio State affiliation connects the work to a program with formal NTSB and FAA relationships, giving the paper potential regulatory downstream reach that typical UAP research lacks.
• The framing of UAP events as 'occupational safety events' is a direct rhetorical move: it invokes OSHA and FAA reporting obligations, implying that current non-reporting by flight crews may constitute a regulatory gap rather than merely a cultural one.
• Iya Whiteley's UCL space-psychology background introduces crew psychological-response modeling, the same toolkit used for astronaut anomalous-event debriefs, into what is otherwise a civilian aviation context.