Information - The Key to Increases in Safety

Recently, Australia's CASA released a document "An Assessment of Trends and Risk Factors in Passenger Air Transport". This document is one of CASA's initiatives to identify risk and address it, thereby enhancing aviation safety.  The notion of data gathering and analysis is not new and is contemplated in section 9(1)(g) of the Australian Civil Aviation Act, which obligates CASA to conduct regular reviews of the system of civil aviation safety. Indeed, similar exercises have been undertaken in the past, so in my opinion, this is a good second step in an eternal process; however I found the assessment a little superficial. I think that it could have been more comprehensive. Click here to read the report.

The US FAA established the Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing intitiative (ASIAS) a few years ago with some success. Apparently, the keys to the success of this initiative are information sharing, analysis and trust. Clearly a high level of trust is required to enable useful information to be gathered and shared by the regulator and other relevant stakeholders (including global stakeholders). This requires a higher level of maturity on behalf of the regulator, industry and other stakeholders.

In a speech recently, the FAA Associate Administrator, Nick Sabatini stated inter alia, that the aviation community is on the threshold of reaching the next level in aviation safety, and the key to higher levels of safety is using safety data to identify remaining or previously undiscovered risk.  Click here to read Mr. Sabatini's speech.

In the speech he gave an example of how data had been used to increase understanding and make a difference in aviation safety. Following an accident in August 2006 in Kentucky where an aircraft took off from the wrong runway, the ASIAS undertook a examination of 116 wrong runway departures over the past 20 years. In the study, they found that there were common physical characteristics that could lead to pilot confusion and result in a departure from the wrong runway. This is very powerful information.

Understandedly, many aviation safety initiatives have involved addressing some active failure in a system. For example, a wrong runway departure may be addressed by providing better familiarization training, documentation and signage for pilots; and once this is done, little more examination is undertaken to reveal latent failures in the system which may have also contributed to the incident.

In my opinion Mr. Sabatini has hit the nail on the head when he uses the phrase, "previously undiscovered risk.".   Possibly, the low hanging safety fruit has been harvested, and the hard work is just starting. Industry and the regulator are now required to dig deeper to look for hitherto undiscovered active and latent failures. The latent failures are generally well hidden and some considerable trust, patience and energy is required to identify and address them.

Our challenge is to engender trust between industry and government agencies, encourage information sharing and find previously undiscovered aviation risk in all areas of the system of aviation safety.

Robert Collins | Sunday, May 18, 2008 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) | Permalink