Safety management - checkcrosscheck

Safety Management

Let's delve into the essence of flight safety, the ways to achieve and maintain it. We will discuss the principles and thresholds of safety adopted in modern aviation.

Read

Safety Management in modern aviation

Reading time: ~10 minutes

Flight safety most commonly refers to a group of principles, concepts, processes, and measures aimed at preventing incidents, accidents, and undesirable deviations during flights. This term encompasses tools that help managers, developers, and operators better perform their duties and prevent or avoid significant deviations in the operation of systems, both aircraft and human.

What are we talking about today?

Terms, Goals and Scope of Safety Management

Chapter 1

History of Safety Management

Chapter 2

Reactive Safety Management

Chapter 3

Proactive Safety Management

Chapter 4

The Cost of Safety

Chapter 5

Terms, Goals and Scope of Safety Management

Let's start with a small bureaucratic note: the official wording of ICAO. Flight safety is an organizational concept that identifies, assesses, and manages risks with sufficient accuracy to eliminate them.

The main goal of flight safety is to prevent injuries and deaths of people, as well as damage to nature and property in aviation activities.

Flight safety covers a wide range of issues - not only those directly related to flights. Ground services, airport activities, technical staff training, medical restrictions - all these factors are taken into account and considered.

History of Safety Management

Flight safety as part of aviation emerged only in the mid-90s. Before that, there was a so-called "fly-fix-fly" system, which meant that changes to flight programs and operations were only made after accidents and incidents occurred. With the development of global aviation, there was a need to gather all the experience in one concept so that progress in technology could keep up with progress in methods of combating errors, violations, incidents, and disasters.

Since the mid-90s, a new approach to flight safety has been developing towards a proactive approach to problems, which in theory should greatly increase the safety of this industry.

Reactive Safety Management

According to the ICAO Safety Management Manual (Doc 9859) safety management in the aviation industry is a combination of the two described perspectives, traditional and modern. The reactive (or traditional) safety management approach is useful when dealing with technological failures, or unusual events. It is generally described by the following characteristics:

1

The focus is on compliance with the minimum safety requirements
2

The level of safety is based on reported safety occurrences, with its inherent limitations, such as: examination of actual failures only; insufficiency of data to determine safety trends; insufficiency of insight regarding the chain of causal and contributory events; the existence and role of latent unsafe conditions.

Proactive Safety Management

The proactive approach in the safety management is based on following a risk management strategy that includes identifying hazards before they materialise into incidents or accidents and taking the necessary actions to reduce the safety risks. Components of a proactive safety management strategy are:

1

Unambiguous safety policy ensuring the senior management commitment to safety
2

Hazard identification and risk assessment using state-of-the-art risk assessment methods
3

Safety reporting systems used to collect, analyse and share operational safety related data
4

Building a corporate safety culture that fosters good safety practices and encourages safety communications in a non-punitive environment
5

Safety lesson dissemination and sharing best practices among operators and service providers;

The Cost of Safety

Safety cannot be achieved without consequences. Every company has limited resources, financial and human, that it can allocate to ensure flight safety. In addition, there is a constant conflict between safety, productivity, efficiency, comfort for crews and passengers - and a balance must be found in all of this.

The main indicator of a modern airline is that spending on Safety Management Systems does not depend on the financial condition of the enterprise. The airline's interest in flight safety must be constant, visible from within and outside, regardless of what economists say and what is happening in the industry as a whole.

Conclusion

Safety Management is a separate industry within aviation. Flight safety specialists are among the most valuable in the industry because aviation depends on safety. Every disaster or incident is a bitter experience and a series of mistakes from which it is incredibly important to draw conclusions and prevent similar incidents in the future.

Even all the components of a proactive flight safety system themselves do not provide the required level of flight safety. The need for their integration into the essence of airlines has led to the emergence of entire systems that constantly work on improving, implementing and controlling modern methods.

What can we, as individual aviation workers, do for the benefit of Safety Management? First and foremost: know and comply with documentation. Our guiding documents are written, as loud as it may sound, with blood - generations of pilots and employees who through incidents and disasters have defined the boundaries of our industry. To be a competent professional, one must value their experience, know and follow documentation and recommendations, and be prepared for new challenges that our work may present us.

Name of arcticle: Safety Management
Release date: 6/8/2023
Acrticle author: Nikita Pavlov

Ditching

Ditching is a controlled emergency landing on the water surface in an aircraft not designed for the purpose, a very rare occurrence.

Area navigation and ATC. Part 1

The article explores the impact of the introduction of zonal navigation on the modern air traffic management system

Functional augmentations of GNSS

The article explores satellite and ground-based augmentations to GNSS in aviation.

Standard Phraseology

The ability for verbal communication is a key distinction between humans and other beings. In fields such as aviation, it plays an even more crucial role.

CFIT

Controlled Flight into Terrain (CFIT) - a huge topic in aviation. Today we'll see what it is about

Area Navigation