Achieving a satisfactory level of safety used to be considered straight-forward: build good aeroplanes, train good pilots, respect an aircraft's limitations in the face of the elements, and take off, trusting that nothing beyond the capabilities of the aircraft/pilot team will occur. Key words in the traditional approach included "belt and braces" (now dubbed fail-safe), airmanship, and good luck.
Those remain the basic components of safety today, but they are no longer enough.
Firstly, there are tools available now which vastly reduce the need for one of those components: luck. Praying for luck is an admission that there are risks out there but you have no idea what they are. Today there are ways of identifying the operational and technical risks each airline faces.
Risks may have changed, but they remain despite the fact that aeroplanes and engines are more technically reliable now than they were 20 (let alone 50) years ago. They are far more complex, fly faster in more crowded skies and have the means to operate safely in worse weather. The new equipment has given the operators and the pilots increased power to do things they would not have attempted with earlier generations of aeroplanes.
It is axiomatic that with increased power comes increased responsibility. The danger - and the evidence - is that many in the industry do not understand, or do not respect, the new responsibilities.
Perhaps the most cruel example is the accident rate among both large jet and regional turboprop operators in the Asia Pacific region during the 1990s. Airlines in the area have equipped themselves with one of the youngest fleets in the world, largely as a result of the increased prosperity in China and in many of the now troubled "Tiger economies", yet their accident rates do not all square up with the standards which modern equipment could confer.
China, Indonesia, Taiwan, Korea and the Philippines all have accident rates notably less good than the world average, and Thai Airways International, formerly with a good record, has slumped. It only takes two major crashes in one decade for a medium sized airline to drop out of the world's top half into the bottom half of safety performers. So Asia could do better.
So could Africa and Latin America, although the latter shows signs of responding to some of those measures which reduce the need to rely on an element of good fortune.
It is not necessary for an aviation journal to make up its own checklist of the components which make a modern airline safe. The advice is there to be had from the world's aviation safety organisations. So here they are, complete with information contacts:
the airline's national aviation authority (NAA) should be an autonomous agency exercising proper safety oversight. It has been independently audited (contact: the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO)); the NAA and the airlines are members of a regional safety forum which identifies risks specific to the area of operation (contact: ICAO); the NAA is working with the airlines to set up a flight operations quality assurance programme (contact: International Services division, UK Civil Aviation Authority); the airline chairman is directly accountable for safety, and the board contains a member who reports on all aspects of safety (contact: Flight Safety Foundation (FSF); the airline has obtained and used an FSF Checklist to assess its exposure to the risks of controlled flight into terrain, and has either fitted or has plans to fit an enhanced ground proximity warning system to its fleet (contact: FSF or aircraft manufacturer); the airline continually supervises its pilot and engineer selection and training, even if it is subcontracted to a specialist training organisation ; the airline has a non-punitive confidential safety reporting system (contact: FSF); the airline has a flight safety department responsible for processing reports, devising solutions, tracking their application, and assessing the results (contact: British Airways Safety Information System).An airline which can honestly tick every checklist item either is, or will soon be, among the world's top safety performers.
Source: Flight International
