Where Birds Don't Fly

Goals within a Safety Management world are derived from data collected, or borrowed, or just picked out of thin air. After a decade or so operating within an SMS world, airlines and airports have collected thousands of datapoints to be recorded in the hazard registry. The SMS process for both airports and airlines have enough inhouse data to design useful goals.  The goalsetting process is a decision process based on data collected and entered in the hazard registry. When data is transformed to numerical or alphabetical values they turn into information. Information consumed generate knowledge and with when knowledge is processed it becomes comprehension of one or multiple integrated systems. Data is the foundation for goalsetting, but just the data in itself is an unuseful tool to generate practical goals until each datapoint applied have completed the comprehension process. It is a simple task to set a goal based on events or a currency value. However, it is a comprehensive task ...

One misconception in the aviation industry is that there are major conflicts between safety and profits. Conventional knowledge is that one cannot operate with an effective profit-margin system while at the same time operating with an effective safety system. Let’s for a moment assume that this is true and that for each safety system implemented there is huge reduction in profit and the profit margin.  When the safety-card is played there are no opposition to their choice of corrective action plan. Nobody wants to argue against safety. When someone wants a specific result, they use the safety-card to get what they want, and they draw root-cause solutions from an emotional data base rather than a hazard registry or an analytic data base. The safety-card is played in the aviation industry, it’s played in the long-haul transportation industry, it’s played to protect public safety and it’s played when nobody has a true answer for their solutions to the issue or event other than a safet...