Keeping the aviation industry safe - Safety Intelligence and Safety Wisdom

This white paper is the output of a study from an EC-funded Horizon 2020 Programme called Future Sky Safety which is looking at, amongst other safety priorities, how organisations stay safe in their day-to-day business operations. The project includes a focus on how senior executives run a safe organisation. This involves engaging with some of the senior executives – typically CEOs or COOs – and asking them how they deal with safety. This white paper reports the results of this study, discussing how executives use safety intelligence to make safe business decisions.

Aviation today is seen as a very safe industry, yet recent accidents have shown that vulnerabilities still exist. In particular, events can occur which were not previously foreseen, so-called ‘game-changers’ such as MH370, MH17 and Germanwings 9525. Those at the top of aviation organisations have the difficult job of running their businesses profitably, and keeping them safe from threats whose likelihood – and in some cases, their imaginability – is hard to assess.

Safety Intelligence is generally being used to refer to the various sources of quantitative information an organisation may use to identify and assess various threats. This has traditionally been incident data and other safety information on precursor events which, when put together, can give reasonable predictions about likely accidents and measures to avoid them.

Safety Wisdom refers to the judgement and decision-making of those in senior positions who must decide what to do to remain safe and how they also use quantitative and qualitative information to support those decisions. This could be proactively in relation to a future or emerging threat, or reactively to an accident that has happened to another similar organisation.

Both Safety Intelligence and Safety Wisdom are needed. But while Safety Intelligence has been explored to some extent, the way in which top executives make decisions concerning safety is little understood and hardly researched.

This White Paper took the approach of asking senior executives themselves. Sixteen executives were interviewed from Airlines (3), Airports (3), Air Traffic Management (6), Regulation (2) and Research (2) sectors of the aviation industry (the interviews unfortunately could not include the manufacturing part of the industry, a key player in aviation safety). The responses they gave to a broad set of interview questions focused on five areas:

1. Safety first - but not at any cost
2. Maintaining safety under pressure
3. Accountability and Responsibility at the Top
4. Searching for Evidence
5. Seeing around the Corner