Human Factors in Aircraft Maintenance: Linking Occupational Motivation, Work Alienation, and Flow Experience

Today's aviation maintenance environments place significant cognitive and psychological demands on aircraft maintenance technicians due to increasing fleet size, intense operational pace, and extremely low tolerance for error. In this context, understanding the psychological and motivational processes that shape the human performance of maintenance personnel is critical for the sustainability of flight safety. This study aims to examine the relationships between work alienation, occupational motivation, and work-related flow in aircraft maintenance technicians within a holistic model framework. The research was conducted using data from 207 aircraft maintenance technicians. Descriptive and correlational analyses were performed using IBM SPSS Statistics (version 31). The proposed research model was tested using structural equation modeling (SEM) via the SEM module of Jamovi (version 2.7.6) software and the lavaan package running in the R environment. The mediating role of occupational motivation was evaluated using the bootstrap resampling method. The findings show that work alienation significantly and negatively affects occupational motivation and work-related flow experience; while occupational motivation positively predicts work-related flow. The results indicate that human performance in maintenance settings should be considered not only from the perspective of technical competence and error management, but also by taking into account motivation and psychological attachment processes.