Consumer Perceptions of Aircraft Safety Scale (C-PASS): An Empirically Developed Scale for American Consumers

Safety is one of the most important constructs in aviation, and has been researched widely in the past few decades. While there are safety scales developed for other fields, we do not know of any scale that has been validated for the purpose of having consumers provide ratings of aircraft safety. The current study seeks to fill this gap in the literature by presenting evidence for a valid and reliable scale that can be used to rate the safety of commercial aircraft. We had consumers assist in providing items for the scale and subsequently narrow those items down to nine statements for the final scale. We then used factor analysis and reliability tests to provide evidence for a valid and reliable scale. Lastly, we demonstrate the discriminability of the scale when comparing different commercial aircraft. In this paper, we discuss the detailed methodology that we used to develop this scale.