Posts about stuff relating to airports
Serious Incident Review: Aerodrome Closed Due Works
Not all aviation incidents are accidents, but they are all learning opportunities. This serious incident involving a larger private aircraft at a relatively quiet regional aerodrome builds on some of the lessons from yesterday’s post and helps me build towards tomorrow’s discussion on Australian aerodrome works safety standards. So, let’s discuss the day a Merlin took off from a closed runway at Gunnedah.
Don't Wait for the Investigation Report: Speculation Can Be Good
In these times of almost ubiquitous video, we are sometimes inundated with footage from all manner of safety incidents and accidents. Coupled with social media, professional and otherwise, this makes for lively discussions on causes and contributory factors as soon as the footage becomes available. Unfortunately, a lot of these discussions are not useful and are often met with calls to wait for the investigation report and resist the urge to speculate.
But I can’t say that I agree with the blanket call to avoid speculation and wait for an investigation report and here is why.
Header image: Francesco Ungaro (via Pexels)
Learning Lessons Through Investigations, Reviews & Analysis
Incident investigations have long been a key part of Safety Management System activities that a good airport operator is expected to undertake.
Creating a Free Airport Safety Reporting & Management System
Safety reporting is the life-blood of a modern safety management system. In the early days of implementation, a great deal of effort was (and still is) expended in increasing the reporting of safety events (incidents and other occurrences) and hazards. As an industry, we’ve discussed and debated no-blame and just cultures. We’ve promulgated policies and waved flags, telling our team members that we can’t manage what we don’t measure. And we’ve implemented safety occurrence reporting systems to capture all this information.
If we’ve been successful in these endeavours, we’ve then faced a new problem - what do we do with all these reports? A classic case of be careful what you wish for!
Missed Opportunities: We Should be Doing Better
Over the past year or so, I've written about a couple of topics that seem to have converged into this post. Airport professionalism, the application of aerodrome regulations (twice), runway strip standards and accidents were topics I recently explored and after doing so more research I stumbled across a couple of incident investigations in Australia that bring these previous articles together.