Where Birds Don't Fly

Every operator with a safety management system (SMS) conducts regular SMS performance assessments of their systems. In a healthy performance environment, assessments are conducted daily within a quality control system. As a businesslike approach to safety, an SMS enterprise has an obligation to learn how their systems are performing, in the same manner as a business assess their cashflow daily. In a business the cashflow is the leftover after cash is received and cash paid. If a business's cash acquired exceeds its cash spent, it has a positive cash flow. A positive cash flow means more cash is coming in than going out, which is essential for a business to sustain long-term growth. This same principle goes for a healthy and sustainable long-term growth of a safety management system.  Conventional wisdom is that a healthy safety management system for airports or airlines, is a system without incidents, or a system with reduction of incidents over time. The question to answer with th...

The iceberg effect is a variant of the Heinrich Pyramid developed in the 1930’s. Herbert W Heinrich put forward the following concept that, in a workplace, for every accident that causes a major injury, there are 29 accidents that cause minor injuries and 300 accidents that cause no injuries. The Heinrich Law was widely accepted by the global aviation industry as a risk analysis tool and incorporated into the safety management system.  The Heinrich Pyramid is commonly known as the safety pyramid, or the safety triangle, and indicates a relationship between major injuries, minor injuries, and near-misses. The Heinrich Pyramid concludes that injuries and incidents are caused by a human decision to perform an unsafe action, and that by lowering the number of minor injuries, businesses could reduce the total number of major injuries and incidents. While the most often cited figure would suggest an emphasis on human errors, Heinrich also suggested that workplaces focus on hazards, not j...