Safety is no accident

Citation

(2001), "Safety is no accident", Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, Vol. 73 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/aeat.2001.12773eac.001

Safety is no accident

Safety is no accident

The number of civil aircraft in service is forecast to double in the next decade. To maintain or improve our present safety levels, the aircraft fatality rate must be made to decline as fast or faster than the worldwide average growth rate of civil aircraft. The accidents attributed to, or containing an element of, human error have actually increased over the last decade. This, coupled with the fact that frequency of maintenance requirements has decreased, is a trend that must be reversed. This Royal Aeronautical Society Conference under the Chairmanship of Mr E.A. Ingram, Chief Surveyor (retired) of the UK CAA, addresses some of the practices and procedures to help achieve this aim.

Figure 1 Jet transports 60,000lbs or greater

The keynote address was given by Mr G. Rebender, Operations Director, JAA, The Netherlands. His paper explored the operator global accident prevention and flight safety strategy (see Figure 1) and broadly considered three topics, the first being the JAA safety objective. Overall, the JAA aims at continuous improvements of its effective safety system leading to further reductions of the annual number of accidents and the annual number of fatalities irrespective of the growth of the air traffic. The JAA places its highest safety priority on fare-paying passenger services based on two complementary approaches: The historic approach; and the proactive approach:

1. 1.

   historic approach areas of discussion are:

2. 2.
   • •

     primary causal factors;

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     circumstantial factors; and

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     consequences.

3. 3.

   The future aviation safety approach is the proactive approach. Here, the tasks are to identify, prioritise and analyse any ongoing and future changes; how these effect the aviation system; with the objective to reveal unidentified hazards and recommend intervention.