Is Pilot Error Inevitable?

[ab0767]

Kelvin

 

you have stated that you are an OH&S professional, you ask a lot of deep questions but for those of us that are not specialised in your field I am interested in your thoughts about our safety culture and any ideas to improve it or indeed any suggestions you may have

 

 

[Kelvin]

Attributes of an airman.

 

Thanks ab,

 

You have certainally given me plenty of scope:chuffed:, but I'll try to break it down into something meaningful and see how it pans out.

 

FAA CULTURE:raise_eyebrow:. It appears that CFI's and CASA set the tone in much the same way as OHS Professionals and WorkCover do in the workplace. The forces behind their influence is consequences. Both rely on systems safety as it applies to high risk operations like transportion, building & construction, mining and petrochemical. Before systems safety we had safety programs, leadership, regulation and more recently psychology (BBS). All these processes have served us well. You would know intuitively that if the culture had been more in tune, the outcomes would have been even better. Like no loss of life, for example.

 

IDEAS:idea:. Culture is a mix of beliefs, values. attitudes and behaviours. Now, we know we can measure culture and the outcomes are predictive. For example, if your mother found a wallet inside a supermarket trolley, you know what she would do about it. You know her principles regarding honesty. If we could establish 10 personal values that makes a good pilot that we could aspire to, we could convert them into imperatives and build them into a five level matrix and assess the values against the levels, we will be measuring our culture. As you know, "What gets measured and rewarded, gets done. The values that are assessed as weak, we can do specific exercises we know will work, to bring it up to the next level. This is leading edge stuff right now.

 

SUGGESTIONS . Notice all the ideas involve what we can do, not management or the regulators. Although, they'd be delighted if we took the iniative to establish and measure our safety culture. We should just sit back now and wait for someone to put a challanging or an opposing point of view on this thread, and go from there. It is an easy process once we have worked through the first value. Then everyone wants to jump in (thats been my experience) and we are on our way. It's very exciting stuff. What do you think?

 

Kelvin (with a long way to go but not on his own)