Thank you, Vice Admiral [Tom] Barrett. Good morning, and welcome
to our fourth annual international safety forum. I see lots of old
friends and lots of new faces. Our first conference drew 330
attendees from 15 countries. Since then, we’ve eclipsed that
mark every year, this year included. To me, that shows that as an
industry — as a global industry — we’re all
pointing in the same direction.
Let me start off by thanking Admiral Barrett for opening things
up. I think he put the issue for us in just the right context.
Safety is a shared responsibility. As you read the Admiral’s
biography, you see that his view of safety comes from a different
angle: the Coast Guard. Let me say for the record that there are
very few 30-foot swells in commercial aviation. But even at that,
the message is the same. No matter where you are or what you do,
whether it’s on a plane or on a ship, safety’s got to
come first.
I think safety first is the best way for all of us to look at
this conference. While the message is indeed the same —
safety — the challenge, though, is a bit different for us in
aviation. The question for us in aviation is how to maintain the
safety record that’s the envy of all transportation. This is
the safest period in the safest generation in the history of
transportation. It’s been called the Golden Age of Safety,
and that’s precisely right.
So how are we going to raise the bar? The answer to that,
I think, is simple to say but a challenge to implement. The answer
is SMS — safety management systems — and the challenge
I’m here to issue today is for each of the people in this
room to become activists for safety management systems. If your
operation, or organization, or your nation, doesn’t have one
in place or isn’t yet moving toward developing one, that
needs to change.
The challenge for you is to return to your cockpit, your
workplace, your country, and push hard for SMS. Aviation no longer
is in the business of combing through ashes and wreckage to find
answers. SMS will give us the intelligence we need before the
problem reaches the headlines. When it comes to risks, the
low-hanging fruit is long gone. SMS uses hard data to point us in
the direction we need to go. We don’t have to wait for
something bad to happen.
Before I talk more about SMS, I’d like to spend a moment
framing where we are. Aviation is safe; that’s a given. But
it’s also growing. Boeing and Airbus set sales records
— 65 billion dollars in firm orders in the first two days of
the Dubai air show. Dubai Aerospace alone is buying a hundred
planes from each manufacturer at a total cost of more than 27
billion dollars.
We’ve got a similar success story on our hands with
business jets. There was a time not too long ago when North America
accounted for 80 percent of biz jet purchases. The demand from
Europe, Asia-Pacific and Latin America is soaring. Projections for
next year point to deliveries of more than 1,300 business jets
worth a record 22 billion dollars. That’s up from 506
deliveries worth $8.2 billion in 2003.
In terms of sheer passenger counts alone, the U.S. continues to
set records every year. We’ll see a billion commercial
passengers by 2015.
Bottom line: we’ve got a rapidly growing aviation
environment. More people. More planes. And with that comes the
challenge of orchestrating them from point A to point B. For each
of us, there’s the complicating factor of resources that
aren’t growing along with the upward spiral of aviation. Make
no mistake here — this is not a commentary on tight budgets.
Rather, this is an acknowledgment that none of us has a blank
check. It’s an acknowledgment that all of us need to adopt
strategies to help handle an upswing in activity with the same
level of safety that we’re seeing in today’s golden
age.
Here in the United
States, fatal air carrier accidents have dropped 65 percent since
1996. That works out to one fatal for every 4.5 million departures.
Internationally, the numbers are dropping as well. If the 1996
accident rate had remained the same through last year,
there’d have been almost three dozen major accidents. The
actual number of fatal accidents was 11.
Yet, from an international perspective, accident rates vary
considerably, with some regions doing well and some not so
well.
So, the point is that collectively, we all still need to take a
step up, and I’m including the United States of America in
that group as well. The safety management system approach will
enable us to do that. SMS enables you to keep your eye on the ball
every single day. Ultimately, we don’t want to just meet ICAO
minimums. Ultimately, our goal is to raise the bar worldwide no
matter where you go. No matter what flag’s on the tail. From
takeoff to touchdown and all points in between, we want to ensure a
consistent level of safety.
At its most fundamental level, a safety management system helps
organizations identify and manage risk. It does not wait for
something to happen. It doesn’t rely on anecdotal
information. It is based on hard data. Safety management systems
help us manage risk far better than we have, because it’s a
disciplined and standardized approach to managing risk. We can
review past experience and address known hazards at the same time
we can look ahead and rigorously apply safety risk management.
At the very core of the SMS is the need to identify potential
hazards and then analyze risk. After that, the next steps are to
rank hazards and assess risk, and then identify mitigation options.
It’s a closed-loop process where identified risks are
mitigated and the mitigations are monitored to provide continuous
system safety.
Our Air Traffic Organization is adopting a Safety Management
System for its operational policies, processes, and procedures.
Our Aviation Safety organization is moving to an SMS construct.
Last year, Nick Sabatini’s organization developed an SMS
doctrine and now his group is moving surely to implementation. The
next logical step to enhance safety is what I see as the evolution
from “inspecting safety” to taking a systems approach
with SMS.
What’s important in this construct is that SMS is being
implemented in accordance with ICAO standards that are themselves
being changed to apply a systems approach to aviation safety in all
aviation domains, including air carriers and airports.
That’s a fundamental difference with the SMS approach
— the process itself is overseen. The burden is on the
service provider to ensure the safety of the products and services
it provides — whether it is design and production of
aircraft, air carrier operations, or air traffic control. In this
way, both regulator and service provider can better target
resources based on risk.
Perhaps the best way to
characterize the safety management system is to say that it is a
structure of voluntary, non-punitive reporting methods set up with
an organization to foster safety awareness all across the board.
Even small bits of information can point to a larger problem before
that large problem can become a catastrophe.
So, this is the FAA’s view of SMS. What does it mean to
you? Our recent Call to Action for runway safety is an example
of using SMS principles. As you know, we’ve had a string of
events that pointed to a problem with our runways. They involved a
variety of factors — miscommunications, missed turns on
taxiways, a snowplow, missed turns onto an active runway, signage.
There are more examples, but you get the idea: runway safety
is a major concern.
When we issued our Call to Action, we looked at 5.4 million
records covering a 20-year period. We found 117 isolated instances
of flight crew confusion here in the States involving a variety of
issues.
Our call to action is addressing these issues as we speak.
Short-term action such as enhancing runway markings and improving
pilot training are already under way.
We also just completed a Universal Safety Oversight Audit
Program here in the U.S. I don’t need to tell many of you in
the audience today about the comprehensive nature of this audit but
I can tell you that we learned a lot about ourselves in the
process. We learned that Aviation Safety’s ISO certification
has led to great improvements in standardization since the ICAO
last audited the FAA in 1999. We learned that our already safe ATC
system can be made even more safe if we develop formal agreements
between agencies and if we work with airport authorities across
this country on common safety improvements.
What this shows is that even as our safety record and oversight
tools are first-rate, we still need to be more vigilant. Little
events that seem insignificant take on a different meaning when
viewed through the lens of the bigger picture. It’s all about
continuous improvement, and SMS will produce that outcome.
An SMS isn’t something you pull off the shelf when the
need arises. It’s got to be maintained, ingrained.
In closing, let me emphasize that with SMS, everything is
interdependent. The true value comes when data are shared, not
isolated. There’s no place in safety for secrets. The
challenge, now, is up to you. I encourage you to make the most of
the information you’ll be hearing. Thank you.
ANN's Daily Aero-Linx (04.13.24)
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