David Learmount/LONDON
A Boeing 747 noses up to a docking point, wingtips avoiding the 747s either side by what feels like about a metre. The parking brake is applied, the crew shuts down the engines and, as the anti-collision lights are switched off, an army of workers and vehicles converges on the aircraft.
Looking like a ship in dry dock - and just as effectively separated from its natural element - the 747 is suddenly the epicentre of a whirl of activity. Things are happening underneath it, beside it and within it. This is a turnaround, and pushback time is on everyone's mind. The opportunities for collision and accidental damage in this maelstrom are legion.
That danger was largely disregarded until the 1990s. Less attention was paid to ramp incidents, which were less spectacular and less costly than airborne accidents, until their frequency and total cost each year began to be noted. The Flight Safety Foundation estimates their annual cost to be $2.5 billion worldwide, taking into account not only direct damage repair, but aircraft downtime and other secondary costs.
Since this dawning of awareness, however, there has been no statistical sign of global apron safety improvement, says the Airports Council International (ACI). The council carries out an annual worldwide Survey of Apron Incidents and Accidents. The most recent survey, assessing the year to November 1996, finds there were 0.435 accidents/incidents per 1,000 aircraft movements, double the1995 figure, but almost the same as in 1994.
The ACI reports 534 apron incidents in the year, of which one-third involved aircraft. Among the aircraft incidents, 29 happened to aeroplanes in motion, "but the majority involved passenger boarding and aircraft loading equipment such as passenger loading bridges, catering trucks and baggage carts".
The nature of airside activity is changing rapidly, not only as a result of the increase in average aircraft size and airport congestion. In Europe, and increasingly round the world, airports are being required to give up the monopoly provision of ground services in the interests of free competition and better service.
In the UK, the drive to liberalise ground service provision began more than 10 years ago and is well established. The result has been greater cost efficiency, but safety is not a natural product of this diversification. Jim Passmore, British Airways' head of safety, observes: "When taking on contractors you have to satisfy yourself that they have standards and a safety culture." Initial and refresher training for contract ramp staff is a constant issue, Passmore says. He sums up some of the broader human factors issues involved when he describes most ramp activity as "low tech people doing low tech jobs in the vicinity of high tech equipment".
The area around an aircraft during turnaround is intensely busy. Although the many tasks being performed may mostly be "low tech", they must be performed quickly and accurately in a small area whirling with activity.
The European Joint Aviation Requirements for Operations has formalised the relationship with subcontractors. It says that a company may delegate a task but not the responsibility for its safe performance, so the airline has a distinct interest in monitoring the quality of operation provided by a contractor.
Since the early 1980s, when congestion and equipment sophistication caused the cost of ramp damage incidents to spiral, the insurance industry has presented a major incentive for ramp safety in cases where the airline provides some or all of its own ground handling or ramp engineering requirements. Insurers have set a minimum "deductible" figure of $0.5 million for self-inflicted ramp damage - for example, collision damage to the aircraft by one of the airline's own baggage loading vehicles. In such a case, the airline is "self-insured" for any damage worth less than $0.5 million - and the figure can be set higher.
Airline finance managers have to be made part of the "safety loop" before improvements in ramp safety can be achieved, says Passmore. If a safety plan costs money - and most do in terms of staff training or investment in equipment - then it must be possible to demonstrate a benefit. Capt Roy Humphreyson, an acknowledged world authority on ramp safety who heads the UK flight safety committee, says: "Some more enlightened airlines have put ramp costs on the budget of one board member. This concentrates minds because it prevents the secondary costs being spread among the various departments and becoming invisible."
Neil Lennox, BA's senior manager for ground safety, says risk management is a part of all decisions. For example, BA's engineering department had traditionally handled aircraft refuelling, but since the task does not demand engineering skills, the airline examined the possibility of using refuelling contractors. A risk assessment was carried out and, in this case, BA went ahead. The airline wants to introduce tow-barless tractors for positioning its aircraft between stands and engineering. These give the tractor driver a high degree of control over the aircraft, allowing it to be towed with no crew in the flightdeck and no power in the aircraft. Although these have been used at Frankfurt by Lufthansa Engineering and Operational Services, at several Italian airports and many other sites for 10 years, the UK Civil Aviation Authority is requiring extensive testing of the process (rather than the tractors themselves) before it gives clearance.
Peter Cox, vice-chairman of the British Airline Pilots Association technical committee, says simple changes can produce a dramatic improvement in the human factors side of apron safety. Air Canada, he says, has adopted a system making one person responsible for all the ramp activity around any given aircraft. The carrier reports that it has worked well. Just before the aircraft docks, the ground staff have what the US carriers call a "huddle" - a pre-docking briefing of the flight's specific requirements. The leader also conducts a short post-docking debrief if necessary.
Still on simple human factors, Passmore points out that the compulsory wearing by BA ramp staff of "tabards" - high visibility jackets - and safety shoes "is changing people's mindsets". Lennox adds: "In the early days our people used to take a lot of stick [teasing] for wearing tabards on the ramp. Now the airports all back us up on this. It has become peculiar not to wear a tabard." People are becoming more safety conscious, he says, and have begun to report unsafe events even when they are outside their own area of specialisation, he says. "Ground handling reports [as distinct from events] are up," says Lennox. "This is good. We're hearing about things before they happen."
Cox remarks that pilots are beginning to report ramp safety threats at foreign airports, acting as "roving inspectors". They are well qualified to recognise both improvements and poor practice, says Cox.
Humphreyson says ramp safety is definitely improving at those airports that promote a safe ramp culture, but globally there is probably little or no improvement. BAA, operator of all London's major airports, keeps a record of all ramp incidents and approaches service providers that crop up regularly in the reports. All reports are filed with the ACI to enable it to track trends centrally and report back.
The means to improve ramp safety are clearly being developed. With increasing surface congestion at airports, however, the challenge is going to increase, not diminish.
Source: Flight International