Posts about stuff relating to airports
Better Emergency Exercises: Purpose, Planning & Failing Willingly
It takes a great deal of work to plan and execute an airport emergency exercise. They require hundreds of people-hours to organise with meetings, discussions, working groups, control plans and reviews. Approvals go up and down multiple reporting lines and resources (people, equipment and money) are committed.
And yet, I think the hardest part of this process, it that it all leads to everyone, and especially the aerodrome operator, opening themselves up to critique. Each exercise should be designed to push the system and to result in some kind of failure. And after all that, we ask others to tell us what we did wrong and while we know that it is better to fail in an exercise, it is never easy to openly discuss your mistakes.
images credit: (cc) Brussels Airport (Flickr Account)
What to expect from RCL2017...
After some very hectic years with little opportunity for writing, I am very excited to bringing The Runway Centreline back to life for 2017. I've been incubating a few ideas over the last 12 months or so and, while I have a lot of work in front of me, I think the next 12 months are going to be very exciting.
What if ... the NOTAM system went down?
A great deal of risk/hazard identification is running through "what if" scenarios. Obviously, the big one is "what if an aircraft crashed?" but others include "what if the lights failed?" and "what if key staff left?" A tweet and associated webpage from the NBAA got me thinking about this scenario - "what if the NOTAM system went down?" Granted, the linked scenario is planned maintenance but it still requires consideration and maybe so does it's unplanned alternative scenario.
Header image: Kaique Rocha (via Pexels)