Where Birds Don't Fly

Since most of the tasks goes right most of the time, every day performance goes unnoticed and viewed as unexceptional tasks. Airports and airlines fall into a trap to accept repetitious tasks as trivial tasks without considering the successful outcome and these tasks to be less important than complex special tasks assignments. Conventional wisdom is that organizational drift in safety is to drift away from safety in operation to unsafe processes. Drift is neutral and does not affect safety in operations to be improved or reduced. Since drift is neutral, safety improvements or safety reductions are neutral. A concept of an effective safety management system (SMS) is to implement changes for incremental, or continuous safety improvements. Continuous safety improvement is a statement applied to emotions. Such statements are often used in sales and marketing describing a new product or service to be new and improved, which implies that the prior product or service was old and inferior. Saf...

An accountable executive (AE) once said that they operate their safety management system (SMS) and airport operations by a principle that more is less and less is more. When operating by this principle, their regulatory compliance was in essence non-existing, and the regulator demanded the surrender of their airport certificate. The airport operator presented a corrective action plan to abolish the principle that less is more, and the regulator accepted their corrective action plan. Their airport certificate was secured, but an enormous task was ahead to establish regulatory compliance with all SMS and airport regulations. After the airport certificate was secured and compliance level established, the airport operator abandoned their quality control system and reverted back to their previously less is more principle.  A regulatory requirement is for the AE to be responsible for operations or activities authorized under the certificate and accountable on behalf of the certificate ho...