Where Birds Don't Fly

What we expect of an audit is that it is an unbiased and a neutral report of the facts.  Everyone in the aviation industry needs to do audits for one reason or another. Audits might be done for regulatory compliance, for compliance with the enterprise’s safety policy, as a contract compliance agreement, at customer’s request as a satisfaction evaluation or after a major occurrence. An airport client must feel ensured that operating out of one specific airport does not cause interruptions to passengers due to inadequate maintenance of nav-aids, visual aids, markings, runways, taxiways, or aprons, or that are any surprises for aircraft, crew or passengers.  An airline or charter operator most often carefully research new airports they are planning to operate out of, and when there is a tie between two or more airports, the one with the best customer service wins the draw. A passenger on an airliner must feel ensured that the flight will be occurrence-free, or a shipper of goods ...

When applying the fact that training is associated with Human Performance, ongoing training becomes a tool to capture process deviations from performance parameters. Deviations from performance parameters are not lack of knowledge, but it is a human factor to take the path of least resistance and to deviate for effectiveness to reach a common goal. Most standardized processes are arbitrarily chosen based on opinions. This does not make the process wrong, bad, incorrect, or dangerous, it is just the fact that someone established the process based on their experience and personal view of what to them made sense. From these processes, rules and job performance expectations are derived to establish the lowest bar acceptable in aviation safety. One example of a new rule that was implemented after an accident was the sterile cockpit rule. This rule was implemented due to one notable accident which caused a crash just short of the runway conducting an instrument approach in dense fog. Trainin...

In aviation, both airlines and airports, teamwork is the foundation for an organization to function within a Safety Management System (SMS). A common expectation is that everyone must unconditionally “take one for the team” for the team to win or succeed. When someone “take one for the team” they are expected to willingly undertake an unpleasant task or make a personal sacrifice for the collective benefit of one's friends or colleagues. Should someone reject this notion that it is moral or necessarily for them to sacrifice their emotions, they will more than likely be kicked off the team.  Conventional wisdom is that there is “no I in team”. This is as far from the fact that it could be. There will always be an “I” in a team. The “I” could be by their position of authority, by their vocabulary, by their technical expertise or simply by their reputation within the organization. Until the Safety Management System came along, it was the “I” in the team who had control over the masses....