SAFETY SITREP Safety-Related Information and Resources from the Vertical Aviation Safety Team
THE IMPORTANCE OF SAFETY REPORTING
By John Franklin, lead specialist, Communications and Safety Promotion European Union Aviation Safety Agency
Imagine you’re at the final question of the game show “Who Wants to be a Flight Safety Millionaire?” (or whatever it might be called in your country). You’ve used all your lifelines. You ask the audience a question about flight preparation, and your CEO helps you at the $250,000 point by actually giving a right answer on Just Culture. Now, you have a shot at the big money. You used your 50/50 and you’re left with two options for this question: Why do you report safety occurrences and hazards in your organization?
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So you are compliant with the rules. Because it’s important for improving safety. So, What’s the Best Answer?
Of course, in the complicated world of aviation, both are effectively correct. If you report only to meet a legal requirement to keep a compliance team and the regulator happy, then you really are missing the point.
The main reason for rules on occurrence reporting (normally set by the national regulator like the FAA or EASA) is to help organizations learn and feed the wider aviation system with useful information to help the whole industry learn.
The better the information you provide, the better the information the system contains on the real hazards and risks that aviation faces and, in turn, the more effective all our safety actions will be.
Reporting allows you to better understand all sorts of things, such as:
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What your top risks are. Where you have resource challenges. Where staff might need more training or support.
Where compliance challenges exist. What happens once a report is raised
Once a new report is raised, the next step is to collect all the relevant information and decide what to do next. There are three key things to focus on during this part of the process:
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Understand what went wrong and why (the traditional occurrences).
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Find out more about what goes right and why (so you can focus on consciously replicating success).
• How things might actually be done compared to what was imagined in the first place (work as imagined vs. work as done).
Have the Right Mindset and a Simple Process
If you want your staff to report as a way of supporting organizational learning, and not just because they had no other choice or couldn’t hide what went wrong, you need to create the right culture and mindset.
This means that you have to embrace every report you receive in a positive way. Staff will report the really important things only if they trust the organization won’t punish them for an honest mistake, for instance a decision made under pressure in tough conditions, and only if they actually believe you care enough to do something with every report.
The final thing about occurrence reporting is that the process has to be as simple and easy as possible. If staff are faced with 20 different forms that all look very complicated, the chances of them completing a useful report at the end of a busy day where something bad happened is pretty small. Urgent issues call for immediate actions. Others can be delayed or put on hold. Provide feedback on action status, with justification to keep reporting momentum and reporters motivated.
How reports are used at national and global level
The report your organization sends to your National Aviation Authority is then analyzed to identify the top risks of the whole rotorcraft community. In the U.S., this is done through the U.S. Helicopter Safety Team (USHST). There are similar groups in countries across the world. This information then drives all sorts of safety activities. This includes ensuring major actions are identified in the country’s State Safety Plan (SSP), from which safety action teams can help with industry-wide activities.
At the global level, people from across the world come together at the Vertical Aviation Safety Team (VAST - https://
vast.aero/) that then collects and shares safety information for everyone to use.
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