Where Birds Don't Fly

The lowest level of safety in a safety regulated airline industry is to maintain regulatory requirements, which is a safety management system including a quality assurance program. In a safety environment the regulations establishes safety objectives for operational management and control. A safety management system includes a process for identifying hazards to aviation safety and for evaluating and managing the associated risks. There are several methods to identify hazards. One often applied method is the "shotgun" approach with an objective to report any hazard discovered. This approach may be combined with an encouragement whoever submits the most gets a prize. With this very broad and undefined definition to report a hazard  own experience becomes a determining factor if a situation or item is a hazard to justify a report. Some scenarios are therefore not identified as a hazard while others justify everything unusual as a hazard. A hazard are to some to be parked next to...

An objective of a Safety Management System (SMS) is to include a Management Review, where the system is evaluated for effectiveness and if the systems are adequate to organizational needs and will continue to meet organizational needs over time. Goals established for a Management Review are activities to be completed for a successful outcome of objectives. Effective goal activities are processes with defined roles of who does it, how it is done and when it's done. Goal is a vehicle travelling to destination named Objective.   Supporting goals for the Management Review are periodic, planned reviews and review for cause. A review for cause goal is the activity to take place when there are major changes in the organization that affects SMS or operations. These major activities could be due to senior management changes or activities requiring new non-established processes to operate.               Other goals for a Management ...

The Civil Aviation Daily Occurrence Reporting System (CADORS) reports daily airport or airline occurrences. Any operators could assume these reports of their operation to be annoying facts  and nothing else but to tell the world of what problems they have to fix. There some truth to this since these reports are  publicly  available and for anyone to view. However, there is also another side to these reports that are extremely valuable to any operator. This information is the discovery of potential unknown operational processes or lack of tools. It is a misconception that people will do what they were told in all situations. It is not that anyone intend to go outside the process, but because minor changes to processes are widely accepted the process deviates over time. Over time these multiple small changes becomes the norm of what is organizational acceptable. With undocumented changes to a process, the next tolerance change does not take into account deviation from ...