RISK MANAGEMENT

In flying I have learned that carelessness and overconfidence are usually far more dangerous than deliberately accepted risks.

— Wilbur Wright in a letter to his father, September 1900.

Risk represents the likelihood of an event occurring and the expected damages if it does occur. Generally risk is calculated on a single event. Exposure is frequently the biggest single factor in risk calculations. There are risk everywhere, when we go for a walk, in our cars, in every kind of jobs, and off course, in aviation. We can learn how to deal with risks but, we can't eliminate them completely, it would be extremely expensive and impossible. The job of the aviation safety manager is primarily to identify risks and communicate that knowledge to the appropriate line manager. The unacceptable risks must be avoided, eliminated or reduced to the point of acceptability.

There are four steps in the elaboration of a risk management program:

1. Make an accurate assessment of the hazards involved.
2. Take the total assessment of the risk involved and ask the line managers if they are prepared to accept that risk.
3. Look at each of the hazards and find those that can be eliminated.
4. Look for hazards that can be reduced.

Aviation Safety Programs
Richard H. Wood

GROUND OPERATIONS SAFETY

Every accident, no matter how minor, is a failure of the organization.

— Jerome Lederer

For an airplane to be in danger, it doesn't has to be flying. Every year, over a billion dollars are spent covering the costs of aviation ground accidents. Airport safety managers try, on a daily basis to remove these types of risk and to eliminate ground accidents. The most typical types of ground accidents are found when the aircraft is taxiing, towing and parking. Also, one of the most important incidents and accidents causes are the runway incursions. As we know, runway incursions are due to the mistakenly presence of an aircraft, vehicle or person on the runways.

Since aircraft traffic grows constantly, more and more airplanes get into mishaps at airports each year. There are approximately 1 runway incident per day in the United States, this might sound like a small number but because there are lives involved and the possibility to be a bigger disaster, 1 incident per day is a big number. The best way to mitigate this is by modernizing safety services and improving communications systems with pilots, such as Teterboro airport which has a small but very efficient presentation which shows pilots about the hotspots of the airport. If every airport creates this type of safety systems, which can be made in one day, thousands of pilots will be more prepared for this type of mishap. Safety and Prevention First.

Some of the solutions I found are:

• To design the flight line with safety in mind.
• Create a plan for controlling the movement of aircraft and vehicles.
• Personnel needs to be fully trained in their job and in the safety of their job.
• All personnel needs to have a basic understanding of personal safety practices and the use of protective equipment.

Either on the runway or in the flight line, it's very important to be as much organized as possible, have the proper markings, well trained personnel, and the proper equipment to prevent all kind of ground incidents.

SAFETY MANAGERS: BEYOND THE SAFETY PROGRAM

If you were born on an airliner in the US in this decade and never got off you would encounter your first fatal accident when you were 2300 years of age and you would still have a 29% chance of being one of the survivors.

— Les Lautman, Safety Manager Boeing Commercial Airplane Company, 1989.

As stated in the Commercial Aviation Safety book, management must provide strong, demonstrable, and visible leadership if the safety program is to succeed. An airline safety manager is in charge of delegating the authority, setting up the organizational structure, and allocating resources to make the safety program work. The safety program is a document with guidelines of how the airline safety will be driven. After the safety program is done, the safety manager have the responsibility to make this program succeed. Among other things, the safety manager needs to attend safety meetings, publicly recognize good safety practices and results, participate in site safety audits and inspections and enforce policies, procedures, and programs.

In general, the Aviation Safety Manager is responsible for:

• Maintenance, review and revision of an Aviation Safety Program;

• Providing timely advice and assistance on aviation safety matters to the Division Administrator and Director of Flight Operations;

• Maintaining a reporting system for accidents, incidents and hazards;

• Distributing aviation safety information;

• Conducting regular aviation safety audits;

• Providing aviation safety training to new personnel;

• Assisting as necessary in conducting accident and incident investigations;

• Maintaining an aviation safety analysis program.

• Developing and maintaining a pre-accident plan.

If all this responsibilities fall into the Aviation Safety Manager, this person must be the leader, teacher, boss, investigator and at the same time, be prepared to respond by himself in situations that require him/her to perform.

SAFETY MEANS MONEY

Of the major incentives to improve safety, by far the most compelling is that of economics. The moral incentive, which is most evident following an accident, is more intense but is relatively short lived.

— Jerome Lederer

Businesses are all about the money, how to reduce costs and how to improve revenue. Aviation is just like any other business. Unfortunately, we pay for mistakes until we make them. Some managers don't see the benefits of complying with OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration which, in the other side, it keeps employees hazard safe. Comply with the safety standards and regulations from OSHA is not cheap, the company has to buy the appropiate equipment to make a better work environment for the employees but, the main reason why managers decide to comply is because it's cheaper to have everything according the regulations, otherwise, fines and penalties and of course deaths can make the business lose thousands of dollars and maybe, the whole business.

Every year, every business have a budget they can use for all kind of business matters, and is very common that managers leave the safety area abandoned. The truth is that accidents are not a common thing to occur on a daily basis, this is a good thing, the bad thing is that people get use to it and forget about keeping the safety area improving. For me, safety is pretty much like an insurance for the business; You don't know when are you going to need it, but at least you know that your business has all the tools to prevent an accident. You might not see how much money you are saving when you have everything according to OSHA but at least, you're not seeing how much money you're wasting paying for fines and penalties. Believe me, this are huge savings!

"IT IS HUMAN TO ERR" FIXING THE HUMAN ERROR PROBLEM

The majority of aircraft accidents are due to some type of error of the pilot. This fact has been true in the past and, unfortunately, most probably will be true in the future.

— Hugh Harrison Hurt, Jr., in the preface of his book 'Aerodynamics For Naval Aviators,' NAVWEPS 00-80T-80, August 1959.

This quote was written in 1959 and now, 50 years later, it still has the same meaning. Making mistakes is natural, we are not made to perform perfectly, even when we differentiate from animals and machines because of our rational thinking and learning, we cannot say that humans are error free. 70% of aircraft accidents are due to human error, whether in the design of the aircraft or the training of the pilot, the human element is always there. As Richard H. Wood says in his book Aviation Safety Programs, accidents are related more to the way the equipment is used than to the equipment itself. The truth is that things don't break by themselves, either we designed them in a way that they will break, we put them in the wrong place or we didn't give them the maintenance required and finally, we misused them.

An error occurs when a task element is:

• Not performed when required
• Performed when not required
• Performed incorrectly
• Performed out of sequence
• Performed late

According to FAA's Human Error and Commercial Aviation Accidents: A Comprehensive, Fine-Grained Analysis Using HFACS, the following are the Human Factors categories involved in commercial aviation accidents:

Organizational Influences

-Resource Management

-Organizational Climate

-Operational Process

Unsafe Supervision

-Inadequate Supervision

-Planned Inappropriate Operations

-Failed to Correct Known Problems

-Supervisory Violations

Preconditions of Unsafe Acts

-Environmental Conditions

-Technological Environment

-Physical Environment

-Conditions of the Operator

-Adverse Mental States

-Adverse Physiological States

-Physical/Mental Limitations

-Personnel Factors

-Crew Resource Management

-Personal Readiness

Unsafe Acts of the Operator

-Skill-based Errors

-Decision Errors

-Perceptual Errors

-Violations

If you want to read more, this is an extremely interesting and useful article for those involved in Human Factors.

http://www.dtic.mil/cgi-bin/GetTRDoc?Location=U2&doc=GetTRDoc.pdf&AD=ADA463865

SAFETY FIRST

Recently a man asked whether the business of flying ever could be regulated by rules and statutes. I doubt it. Not that flying men are lawless. No one realizes better than they the need for discipline. But they have learned discipline through constant contact with two of the oldest statutes in the universe - the law of gravity and the law of self-preservation.
Ten feet off the ground these two laws supersede all others and there is little hope of their repeal.

— Walter Hinton, 24 July 1926, in an adventure article on flying in 'Liberty' magazine.

As we know, the FAA has been in charge of issuing and enforcing regulations concerning to the operation, manufacture and maintenance of aircraft since its creation in 1958. Back in 1926, when the Air Commerce Act was passed, the first set of regulations was created with a huge input from aircraft manufacturers, air transport operators and insurance companies. It's amazing how in those times transport pilots were required to have just 100 hours of solo flight and only 50 hours for the industrial pilots. The truth is that regulations have changed tremendously from time to time, but why? Safety, safety and more safety, the most important word in Aviation. Why do we have rules? Because we need to have limits, a hand that says "Stop!, you can't do that" and all this, for our own safety.

Additional regulations to improve aviation safety were implemented and accidents decreased significantly. According to our book, between 1930 and 1932, the fatality rate per 100 million passenger miles declined by 50 percent. Flight-time limitations were imposed, requirements specified the composition of flightcrews, created standards for flight schools, improved takeoff and landing procedures, set minimum flight altitudes and weather restrictions, and required multiengine aircraft to be capable of flying with one inoperative engine. Years passed by and new technologies in communication and the expansion of the industry required continuous improvements of regulations, airways and airports. With more airplanes in the sky, accidents increased over the time and new organizations and agencies were born.

Now the FAA is celebrating 52 years of rule making and enforcement and they've posted a timeline in their website, come and have a look. http://www.faa.gov/about/history/50th/