PLANE TALK
systems, inspections and audits by industry and the government. It was obvious by the ’80s that a different approach to aviation safety was needed, an even more complete systems approach. This became known as Quality Assurance whereby the top manuals committed the organization to a basic set of principles of how to manage quality and regulatory compliance. It was still backed up by quality control procedures and direct inspection.
HUMAN FACTORS On of the greatest advances was the introduction of the human factors approach to understanding human error. Applied first among flight crews, it certainly has added to safety in maintenance operations. It has also helped to save many technicians from being disciplined to show that some action was taken after an incident. Thankfully those “blame game” events are now less frequent. People in aviation came to realize that safety could be improved by the understanding of human factors, sharing data and perhaps most surprising, moving away from a punishment attitude towards mistakes to one of learning from those mistakes. With the advent of almost instant global news reporting, aviation accidents around the world added to the safety worries of the public and helped drive further changes in aviation safety culture Due to the increasing number of
aircraft flying and steady increase in passenger traffic, many advanced aviation country safety regulators were looking for new ways to decrease the accident rate. The number of accidents were low but increased size of aircraft made aviation accidents news worthy and a major concern to politicians responsible for air safety.
SAFETY MANAGEMENT
SYSTEMS (SMS) By the 1990s, Quality Assurance became firmly established as the model used by aviation maintenance to assure safety. This model was also being applied to flight operations as well as maintenance activities around the world.
Still accidents continued to happen and with increasing global aviation traffic, another move was needed. Senior aviation mangers and regulatory managers were concerned that the current systems were unable to bring the accident numbers down. Tying this to projected traffic growth around the world led them to SMS to affect a future decrease. The accepted solution was to be SMS — a system well-proven in the petroleum and nuclear industries. SMS, a concept of managing safety
first was developed by the energy companies due to them having to deal with so many safety hazards. Canada, among others, soon began promoting a safety culture that started with the chief executive officer and moved on down. Laws were changed to make senior managers more accountable. It had been noted that many failures found under the older Quality Systems could be tied back to lack of senior executive support on the resourcing side. Human Factors took on a life of its
own as well. It was soon recognized that SMS needed a non punitive enforcement system which could only be based on the new field of human factors. So the two grew together. One fault of earlier systems was that an organization could escape retribution by punishing someone lower down the food chain and calling the problem solved. SMS made that a last step only to be used in serious personal action to deliberately circumvent the rules and systems. Human error was to be
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corrected by other means. The work on SMS really began
in earnest in aviation in the early years of the 21st century and is now widespread, especially among larger operations. As an aside, it has now been brought into the medical field. I just completed a knee operation where the surgeons told me they got the handoff procedures from aviation SMS. Nice!
CONCLUSION My take away from witnessing all of these changes; from direct inspection, into Quality Control, Quality Assurance and then SMS is that the fundamentals used in the early years are still valid. I will not try and argue that the new systems approach is not working or is wrong. My background and experience has shown that you need highly-skilled craftsmen and women working in a well-managed safety system. There has been one troubling idea
that developed as we transitioned through these changes — the idea that personal accountability and technical skills are not that important anymore. Some individuals were so taken in by the quality assurance advances back in the early nineteen eighties, they actually proposed eliminating government certification of technicians. Fortunately, that was defeated and personal certification, integrity, training and accountability still underpin the aviation maintenance safety system. In addition, non-certified trades now have national standards. In closing, maintenance
professionals must be careful that this attitude does not creep back in. Safety is first and foremost based on individual skill, integrity, education and a high standard of personal dedication to airmanship.
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