Where Birds Don't Fly

There is a difference between an unknown hazard and a hidden hazard. Unknown hazards are unknown, but they are not hidden. An unknown hazard is a hazard without a hazard classification, it is a hazard defined by likelihood where times between intervals are imaginary, theoretical, virtual, or fictional.  Unknown hazards are incomprehensible to common sense but are still real hazards. An unknown hazard is in the open and in plain view but is not recognized as a hazard for the purpose of an immediate task to be performed. Unknown hazards also need to be assigned a scope and sequence to learn their whereabouts. A person may be exposed to unknown hazards without knowing it. Exposure to an unknown hazard is a higher risk to aviation safety than exposure to known and hidden hazards since they are unknown and cannot be mitigated.  Hidden hazards are known, but they are hidden and may become visible, or active, if triggered by human factors, organizational factors, supervision factors,...

A confidence level is the percentage of times you expect to get close to the same estimate if you run your experiment again or resample the population in the same way. A confidence interval consists of the upper and lower bounds of the estimate you expect to find at a given level of confidence. If an airport is estimating a 95% confidence interval around the mean proportion of daily tasks, based on a random sampling of reports, you might find an upper bound of 0.56 and a lower bound of 0.48. These are the upper and lower bounds of the confidence interval. The confidence level is 95%. With the introduction of a safety management system (SMS) to the aviation, two new terminologies were introduced to the global aviation industry, which were the confidence level, commonly known as a 95% confidence level, and confidence intervals. Prior to the introduction of a confidence level, trends were assessed by the criteria that fewer events are good, and more events are bad. In this system, a trend...

The biggest challenge to run a successful safety management system (SMS) is to operate with a system where regulations are performance based, as opposed to prescriptive. Over the years, since SMS was fist implemented, both airports and airlines had, and still have, difficulty to change over to a system where “the regulations does not say that”. Changing from prescriptive regulations to performance-based regulations did not make sense to airport and airline operators, or the regulatory oversight inspectors themselves. When SMS was implemented, it was assumed that a primary challenge would be to change to a just culture and a non-punitive reporting culture. This assumption was wrong, since the most difficult obstacle to overcome was the change from a prescriptive regulatory culture to a performance-based regulatory culture.  A performance-based culture assesses processes and acceptable work practices for compliance with the regulation, while a prescriptive culture assesses compliance...