Does complying with the aviation alphabet soup make you any safer?
Where are you as an organization with your safety and best practices? You have done your SMS, perhaps you have completed your IS-BAO process or gone through the processes, just not the audit—Are you any safer?
Everyone’s goal is to have a flight department that meets the highest standards of safety. The challenge is how to accomplish this and check yourself? One approach is the traditional audit, which will give you a snapshot in time for one standard. We feel the next step is to use a scenario based workshop to work together to build on the current foundation, compare industry standards and practices with your department, and work as a team to come up with ways of continuing self-improvement. One step past a checklist.
Aviation safety is born out of best practices and adopting them and living them every day. There are multiple ways to accomplish the same end result. By taking what is working and building on those fundamentals, the flight department can become better at what they do.
True professionalism is always looking at how to make things better in the future. It takes each person in your organization to take responsibility to work on their individual shortcomings with a combination of the whole organization looking at preventing small errors by always working on eliminating them.
Dr. Tony Kern in his book “Blue Threat” discusses that accepting “to err is human” is tempting fate for consequences that would be life threatening to you, those around you and your organization. Good enough is not acceptable in our world. First, we need to recognize there are gaps in what each of us does. Encouraging individuals to look for their gaps, and then as a team, learn to be aware of gaps that can be fixed is what continuous improvement is all about.
Society expects that new checklists/procedures will fix the problem. But why do we still have accidents with checklists and procedures that were designed to prevent the accident? The goal of the workshop is to help you look at issues with different points of view and then encourage you to internalize what will make you better into your own personal performance. The final results are a team that functions better and is vigilant for gaps in performance that lead to errors.
Please check out our web site or contact us for more information on our Safety and Best Practices Workshops.
Mike McCracken
President
Hawkeye Aircraft Acquisitions
