Posts about stuff relating to airports
Safety Policy Creation with ChatGPT: Moving From Writer to Editor
Every written safety policy has the potential to be something great and something genuinely disappointing. I have worked at and with airports where the safety policy was the foundation of good decision-making. I touchstone that anchored logical and just decision making. Unfortunately, I have also seen them treated with absolute disdain, sometimes by the senior manager who signed it. And while artificial intelligence like ChatGPT isn’t going to fix that, it might reset the relationship between its words and the safety manager tasked with writing it.
ASW #4: (More than) A Couple of Words on Safety Management Systems (TBT)
Here we are on day 4 of Airport Safety Week and it’s a Thursday, so I am going to cheat a little here and do a massive Throwback Thursday post covering some of my favourite Safety Management System (SMS) related posts.
Image credit: Digital Buggu (via Pexels)
ASW #1: COVID-19 & Safety: A Bow-Tie Risk Assessment Approach
Today’s theme is “maintaining airport safety through COVID-19”. Obviously, this can be a big topic. There are thousands of ways COVID-19 has impacted our daily lives - some large and some subtle. So, in thinking about this topic, I wanted to create a structure we could use to analyse the virus’s impact.
And I landed on the Bow-Tie model. Check it out.
Header: Karolina Grabowska (via Pexels)
Safety Performance Indicators: A False Dichotomy?
Everyone knows that when it comes to safety performance indicators, you want them to be leading rather than lagging. We usually start with lagging because they are easier to spot but we’re pushed to find, track, measure and analyse their much superior cousins, the lead indicators. But is it that simple? Of course not...
Better Safety Risk Management: Uncertainty & Decisions
A lot of us have been doing aerodrome safety risk management for a while now. In that time, I’ve made a lot of mistakes and that means, hopefully, that I have learned a bit about risk management. So, I’d like to share some of my best lessons from being a regulator and practitioner of safety risk management over that time.
Image credit: Taryn Elliot 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!
Blown Away: Risk Management & Public Safety
As an avgeek, I love pictures and videos of aircraft coming into land low over beaches, roads and anything else that happens to be near the end of runways. But should we continue to accept injuries to and the death of people who congregate in these areas during aircraft operations?
Image credit: Richie Diesterheft
Safety Assurance Series
In my second series of articles over at New Airport Insider, I explored the concept of safety assurance. As a "pillar" of Safety Management Systems, I thought I would take a good look at it. I was working very heavily within a highly structured safety assurance system at the time and I leveraged that experience to help me write these articles.
Seussian Safety Management
All three on my children have been brought into the world of reading partially through the works of Dr Seuss. I can't count the number of times I have read his books. As my kids have grown older, they have turned into the reader and read these amazing books back to me.
The Bike Lesson is one of my favourites for the very nerdy reason that towards the end of the book The Berenstains provide us with a short & succinct definition of safety. It's three simple stanzas that I think encapsulate modern safety management perfectly.
Safety Governance Systems
Once upon a time, I went around the countryside auditing aerodrome safety management systems and dutifully asking SMS-related questions of all and sundry. It didn't matter who they were, I asked them what they knew about the aerodrome's SMS, how they managed risks, and what did they do to make sure everything was being well managed. I didn't ask everyone the exact same questions, like asking the guy mowing the grass how he ensured enough resources are available to manage safety, but I did bang the SMS gong at/to anyone who was around or would listen. I'm not so sure that was the right approach.
Trust & Accountability
Recently, I sat in on a presentation on a subject I know quite a bit about. I like doing this as it is typically good to get a different perspective on a familiar subject. In this instance, it wasn't so much the actual subject matter but a couple of associated topics which got stuck in my mind.
Regulation, The Final Frontier?
The week before last, I finished a 4-year stint with the aviation safety regulator. Even though I'm heading back to industry, I'm not going to stop writing this blog. I believe that the role of the national regulator is the next safety frontier (not the last ;)) and I like the idea of exploring new territory. As the industry continues to explore concepts like safety management, systems-based this, risk-based that and outcome-based whatchamacallit as well as safety culture, we are all going to come to the realisation that safety can be greatly affected (more than we ever imagined) by the approach and actions taken by a national regulator.
Crowd-sourced Certifications
I've just been mucking around with a new Internet service called Smarterer. That's not a typo, it really is Smarter-er. I guess, in a nutshell, it's an online quiz creator which is meant to help you quantify and showcase your skills. The twist in this implementation is that the quizzes are crowd-sourced. Anyone can write questions for the quiz and thus over time, the group interested in the topic defines the content and the grading of the quiz.
SMS Considered
While in Bali talking Runway Safety with a wide range of industry personalities, I found myself at the hotel bar talking SMS with Bill Voss from Flight Safety Foundation. The topic was obviously on Bill's mind because upon my return, I found his latest president's piece in FSF's AeroSafety World to be a good overview of his main SMS points. Some of these points have been on my mind too. Since I'm not one to recreate the wheel (providing it works and is fit for purpose), I'll use some of Bill's well-formed words to kick this off.
Image credit: Nick Bondarev (via Pexels)
Integrating Runway Safety Teams with your Safety Management System
I've just spent an amazing week in Bali1 workshopping with operators and regulators from the Asia-Pacific region (and some from further afield) on the issue of runway safety. We got a lot of good information from the Flight Safety Foundation, ICAO and COSCAP as well as airlines, airports and regional regulators. The primary objective of the week was to provide information on and practice in the establishment and conduct of Local Runway Safety Teams (LRSTs). To this end, the seminars and workshop were great but I left feeling like one connection had been missed. The final question on my mind and many others, I am sure, was:
How do these runway safety initiatives integrate into my SMS?
Image: Agência Brasil
"Compliance Doesn't Equal Safety"
I've heard this saying quite a bit over the last few months and in at least one aspect, I agree with the statement. It tends to be true that regulations have failed to keep pace with industry. As such, blind compliance with the regulation no longer ensures an accident-free existence. So what is the solution?
Image: Tanathip Rattanatum