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Next Generation Safety...

with the Flight Safety Foundation and
developed the Safe Landing Guidelines
and techniques to better monitor and
communicate high risk landings. Flight
data monitoring and the associated collaborative efforts represent the next step
for aviation safety. Another example would
be the work that is being done by the various regional safety roundtable groups to
promote best practices and share safety
training opportunities, including the excellent Runway Excursion Prevention workshops hosted by USAIG. The Bombardier
Safety Stand-down is world renowned for
the excellent presentations and insight

(continued from page 5)

provided to all comers. So,
next generation aviation
safety tools are those opportunities to share, communicate, collaborate, aggregate,
trend, and understand the
data that we have all so diligently collected over the last
ten years. Yes, the devil is in
the details. It is not enough
to simply record and correct
hazards you may find within your organization. The next step is to get together with
your peers and develop a deeper understanding of the risks and root causes; to
develop, test and share systemic strategies and solutions.
I would encourage everyone involved in
business aviation to seek out an opportunity to become engaged in the next generation of aviation safety. Join a roundtable,
regional safety committee, or national
level team, such as the National Business
Aviation Association (NBAA) Safety
Committee. The mission of the NBAA Safety
Committee is to promote safety as the cor-

nerstone value of business aviation by identifying significant industry risks and serving
as a center of expertise on a wide range
of safety matters. We have to be laser
focused, not only on identifying the risks,
but on working with key industry stakeholders to develop effective mitigations that
make a difference. We have developed
strategic working relationships with numerous groups to enable us to assemble a
team of volunteers, representing the full
cross-section of our association, intent on
delivering meaningful safety tools for all to
use. Recently, our team participated in our
annual risk analysis for business aviation.
You can find our top ten identified risks on
the NBAA website (nbaa.org/ops/safety/
top-10/). Please do your part to share your
knowledge with a goal of breaking the statistical logjam and making business aviation even safer than it is today.
Steve Charbonneau is Senior Manager,
Aviation Training and Standards for Altria
Client Services and also serves as Vice
Chair of the NBAA Safety Committee.

SMS CORNER

Flight Risk Assessment Tools
By LEE SMITH

When intuitively evaluating the risk of a
proposed flight, most pilots would consider a night IFR flight to be riskier than a day
IFR flight. However, where it gets tricky is
determining how much riskier a night IFR
flight is at the end of a 14-hour duty day
as opposed to the start of the day. What
about a night IFR at the end of a 14-hour
duty day with a low time-in-type crew pairing versus a high time-in-type pairing?
If you keep adding risk factors to this
scenario, at some point a reasonable
pilot would hopefully throw in the towel.
However, the point at which the total risk
exceeds some intuitive limit varies from
pilot to pilot because risk is difficult to
define objectively, and therefore the composite of multiple risk factors cannot be
measured directly.
In the past, risk analysis tools have been
subjective in nature, relying on crewmem6

ries, with each risk factor assigned a specific
value. Proposed flights are then evaluated by
adding together the risk values of factors that
apply to the flight. If the
Incorporating Flight Risk Assessment Tools into total risk value exceeds
predefined thresholds,
a flight department’s daily routine is where the then management must
evaluate the flight to
reduce the risk. If risk
department’s safety culture is put to the test.
cannot be reduced to
acceptable levels, then the flight should not
tempting for a crewmember to tell thembe operated. Flight Risk Assessment Tools
selves, “I’m tired, but if I rank myself as a
ask questions that are black or white, such
3 instead of a 5, I can still make the flight.”
This obviously defeats the whole purpose of as whether or not the flight is a night operation and whether or not the crew has been on
risk analysis.
duty more than 12 hours, to determine total
The FAA has developed a simple model for
risk. This proactive approach to risk manageobjective analysis of flight risk called Flight
Risk Assessment Tools and has included it as ment forces crewmembers to think objectively about each of the individual risk factors
part of its guidance on Safety Management
that make up a flight, and removes a crew’s
Systems. The system consists of a list of
ability to rationalize added risk factors.
objective risk factors across multiple categobers to rate themselves on a list of risk factors. The problem with these is that when
a mission is on the line, it can be awfully

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http://www.nbaa.org/ops/safety/top-10/ http://www.nbaa.org/ops/safety/top-10/ http://www.nbaa.org/ops/safety/top-10/

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