Where Birds Don't Fly

There are several principles applied to the Safety Management System (SMS) and human factors, or human behavior is one of them. Human behavior is predictable and reliable with common cause variations, but also includes an element of special cause variation, or adaptability, which is often assigned as a common cause variation. Human behavior adapts to how things are done on the job, or what is an expected job performance outcome. In aviation, human error or pilot error was over the years determined to be the root cause of all incidents and an accepted system to eliminate human behavior. When pilots became the root cause all written processes, procedures and checklists were deemed to be infallible within an infallible operations system itself. With pilots as the root cause and their deviation form a perfect system, they became the special cause variation which caused the incident. In the mind of every accident analysts and air operator, they had solved the problem until another unrel...

You would think it should work and be safe to run aviation safety the same way as COVID safety is run and managed. The public trust COVID processes completely and without concerns. We do not ask questions about experts’ qualifications and we demand that our leaders lead us down the safe path with their proven COVID safety processes.  A successful process may be applied to other safety concerns and generate a safety outcome. A process that is used to operate a vehicle on icy roads can also be applied to icy runways or icy airplanes wings. The process is the simple plan – do – check – decide – act/adjust process.  Plan is to establish an objective, which is for the public to feel safe or healthy. Do is to carry out what needs to be done to meet the objective. Check is to analyze data from the previous phase. Decide is to make an objective decision at the fork-in-the-road, based on collected datapoints. Act, or adjust is to make changes to improve the process. The objective ...