SAFETY
The Pressure to meet a maintenance schedule comes from the top in any organization, but we also need to deal with our own traditions and try and make sure that our own desire to “do good” doesn’t make us rush.
CONFIDENCE
Confidence is another thing that everybody needs to have to do a job well. Who is likely to be more confident — someone who was trained on a helicopter by on-the- job training, in dribs and drabs and is now being pressured to finish a job, or someone who has had an investment made in them by OEM training and is being told at all levels that being safe and late is better than being on time and not being sure? Why do we ever light the fuse on the petard and hope we’ll be out of the way when it blows? It comes down to money, time and success. If we are airborne law enforcement, we want to be successful and complete the mission. Helicopter emergency medical service (HEMS) crews want to complete the mission and make money doing it. Aerial firefighters want to put out fires and save people and property. All of these occupations are full of “can-do” personalities. That is a good thing when the going gets tough but it is also potentially bad when pride, anger, envy or fear become what rules our decision making process.
Fatigue alone might not cause an accident, but being afraid to say no when pressured to get that engine change done is all that might be needed to make the accident investigator point to fatigue as the cause when the real cause was your being reluctant to stand down because of fear of consequences or inconvenience. I offer no immediate solution to this but I think it needs
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to be discussed more from a “how to fix it” point of view than from a “here’s the problem” perspective. Having a crew watch the latest SMS presentation of the “Dirty Dozen” human failings that can lead to maintenance errors is fine as long as the factors leading up to the errors are presented in real-world representations and offer some way you can actually avoid them. I am tired of hearing a rehashing of these items pawned off as recurrent training. It takes a commitment from management to allow a fatigued or stressed-out employee to have a system in place that allows them to stop working, and yet, we always talk about how fatigue is such a serious problem. Limiting duty time helps, but does not ensure people are rested and focused on the job at hand. Many times we are the only party responsible for coming to work fatigued.
Making sure people use written documentation is doubly difficult because people can read things and interpret them incorrectly or decide on their own that there is a better way and that the person who wrote that procedure must surely never have worked on a real helicopter. Promoting employee assertiveness is a “Dirty Dozen” item but it’s of no value or has a negative impact if management doesn’t listen attentively and respond appropriately. For the most part, failure to use documentation is seen as a time saver because we know how to do a particular job. The root
cause for a maintenance error due to this is fear (of taking too much time or of having someone snicker because you are using the book instead of your natural-born talent of knowing everything there is to know) or laziness because you are comfortable and think you know everything you need and reminders are not necessary. It is a fine line, but failure to use written documentation doesn’t cause errors — rather, it is failure to complete the procedure according to what is written that causes the error and we shouldn’t risk not using reminders when the task is complex. We all forget stuff and need to remember that usually we don’t know better than the people who wrote the procedures.
PRESSURE SITUATIONS Much of what pilots, police, fire and medical personnel must do involves time-critical decisions, making split- second decisions that could mean life or death or damage to an aircraft. The aviation mechanic rarely has to make these kinds of time-critical decisions and this might partly explain why it feels like we can do without the same regimen or intensity of training. For various reasons, though, we make compromises for getting something out the door. The pressure to meet a maintenance schedule comes from the top in any organization, but we also need to deal with our own traditions and try and make sure that our own desire to “do good” doesn’t make us rush. The buy-in to an SMS program needs to start at the highest
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