Why is an industry that is so safety conscious in the air so lax when it comes to accidents on the ramp? Can a new approach solve the problem?
Commercial aviation may be justifiably proud of its safety in the air, but its industrial injury record on the ground is one of the worst among all businesses. According to a recent study, the injury rate to employees of scheduled airlines is 3.5 times as bad as it is among miners, and the vast majority of airline workers’ injuries occur on the airside of airports.
This situation prevails despite multiple attempts to raise the profile of ramp safety. The last concerted industry attempt was led by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) in the mid-1990s, but the organisation admits that it has had no discernible effect.
Two years ago the Flight Safety Foundation (FSF) picked up the ramp safety baton from IATA and has since been leading a major assault intended to raise awareness and encourage good ramp practice. But FSF executive vice-president Bob Vandel, who heads the programme, has acknowledged that, in its present form, the Foundation’s campaign – like IATA’s before it – is not producing results.
Asked if the programme appeared to be having a positive effect, he replied unhesitatingly that it was not. His reaction was almost angry: “We just had a death at Washington Reagan airport [7 June]. A woman operating a belt loader was killed. There is absolutely no reason for anyone to die on the ramp. Every time someone is hurt or killed on a ramp we can trace it to human error at some level. We can do the same thing each time a piece of equipment is damaged or destroyed, whether it is an aircraft or service vehicle, and this is unnecessarily costing the owners of that equipment money. Even when the airport’s physical plant is damaged, one can trace the problem to an error in design, oversight or regulation somewhere in the chain.” By chance, Vandel had been travelling through Washington Reagan that day and seen the fatal accident.
But the FSF is clearly not ready to give up. If its conventional awareness and education plan has not been working, it has to find another way, and that is what it is now doing. In Los Angeles in early June the organisation assembled an international industry gathering of experts from the airlines, manufacturers and airport experts at a workshop designed to brainstorm a solution for this problem no-one has ever succeeded in solving.
Meanwhile, the size of the problem is undeniable. Despite a lack of comprehensive data, the FSF estimates that damage caused to aircraft and equipment in ramp incidents at airports amounts to about $4 billion a year globally – most of it not insured because it is either uninsurable or within the deductibles limit. The fear is that increasing congestion at airports could multiply that risk – and the cost – unless measures to control it can be devised and successfully applied. Taken together, the figures show that civil aircraft ground operations and support systems are anarchic compared with the disciplined, structured, carefully regulated airborne environment.
Cinderella subject
Airport safety, until recently, has been a Cinderella subject for international agencies and for some countries’ national aviation authorities. All the concentration has been on safety from the time an aircraft begins its take-off roll until the end of its landing run. Now, however, airside safety is being approached from all sides as well as from within – but with no discernible results so far. The highest profile airport safety issue in the last few years has been runway incursion, because of potential for creating disaster with multiple fatalities. The most dramatic recent example of runway incursion was the 8 October 2001 collision at Milan Linate airport, Italy which caused the death of 118 people when an SAS Boeing MD-80 collided with a business jet that entered the runway uncleared in poor visibility. This event accelerated action on the already established safety programmes aimed at curbing similar events.
Although runway incursion could be defined as an airside safety issue, the subject is actually treated separately from ramp safety, because aircraft activity on the runway is considered integral with the airborne operational phase. It has for some years been the subject of specific industry education programmes within the European Joint Aviation Authorities, Eurocontrol, the US Federal Aviation Administration, and around the world, having been high on their safety action priorities lists even before the Linate disaster.
The issues of ramp safety and equipment damage on the movement area have never really been put under the microscope, although awareness of the issue is as old as aviation. The figures on ramp injuries are taken from a study by chemical giant DuPont, which was the one of the first companies in the world to devise and put into practice an industrial safety management system. Its own internal programme has been so successful for so long that the company provides safety consultancy to other industries. It found that where the mining industries have an annual record of 3.9 recordable injuries per 100 employees, airside safety tops the blacklist with a rate of 13.6.
The UK Civil Aviation Authority is to conduct an airside safety audit at the world’s busiest international hub – London Heathrow airport. The CAA has been spurred into action by a series of damaging collisions at Heathrow between aircraft and airbridges. The Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), in its study of the incidents, referred to collision with airbridges as “a continuing problem” at Heathrow, and called for the audit. Heathrow’s head of airside operations Ian Taylor says it is implementing a number of AAIB recommendations, and the CAA is holding off from its audit until they have been completed.
The most difficult problem at a complex, busy airport with different airbridge types, Taylor says, is providing airside employees with enough up-to-date information to operate safely and efficiently, without flooding them with so much they become “information blind”. Initial operative training, he says, is good, but he admits refresher training may need improvement.
The CAA’s decision to review Heathrow ground safety is just one small manifestation of the attention the industry is now bringing to bear on the subject. Ramp safety has been an intractable issue for such a long time that the FSF, already two years into its campaign to improve airside personnel safety and reduce damage, was inspired to entitle its current presentation on the subject: “Equipment damage and human injury on the apron – are they a cost of doing business?” And the FSF points out that its campaign is not the first in this field; it is following on from a mid-1990s study and campaign by IATA that did not have the positive effect the association had hoped for.
The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has announced a firm date for bringing airport safety into its remit of 2010. This development might be useful, admits Airports Council International (ACI) Europe policy manager Philippe Joppart, but he fears if badly handled it could merely add another layer of rules, bureaucracy and cost without adding effectiveness.
Human factors
The ACI is working with the FSF on its ramp safety programme, so Joppart is aware of the issues and problems. But he points out that the necessary international standards for airport operational safety already exist in the International Civil Aviation Organisation’s Annex 14. If EASA succeeds in ensuring individual national aviation authorities are more effective in their oversight of these standards, then all is well, he says, but it is not necessary to write a new rulebook. Many airports operate to higher standards than the ICAO minima, he points out.
Perhaps the greatest single reason why ramp safety has been so intractable, says Joppart, is that the problems stem largely from human factors, with the biggest human weakness being failure to follow procedure – basically rule-breaking or poor training. Taylor says stopping people cutting corners on procedure is “more about education than training”. When people do it they usually admit afterwards they knew what they were doing, he explains, and often they cut corners or speed up their actions with good intentions – like trying to dispatch an aircraft on time.
The FSF study so far has discovered that the largest proportion – 43% – of ramp accidents happen in the “gate stop” area. Next comes the gate entry and exit area with 39%, and the remaining 18% happen between gate entry/exit and the runway. There are far more incidents involving damage to stationary aircraft than to moving ones, and even more incidents – in simple numbers rather than value – are “equipment-to-equipment” damage.
Since the meeting in Los Angeles, a new campaign has begun to roll. Following the brainstorming, industry has resolved to analyse more precisely what is needed to break the amazingly dogged resistance of this last chaotic sector of aviation operations to treatment, where traditional encouragement and advice about best practice has signally failed to work.
The result of the FSF-led brainstorming session is a three-phase strategy aimed at upgrading the quality and quantity of ramp accident data the FSF can use for developing solutions. Vandel explains that they had to start somewhere, and it was decided that the first stage – concept development – would be based on operational experience and intuitive reaction to it. The components to be examined include:
- equipment, facilities and operations;
- education and training;
- management and leadership;
- an appropriate model for a ramp safety database.
Phase two, which Vandel says the team has now just reached, will ditch intuition and use the model developed in phase one to carry out a purely data-based problem definition, looking in detail at each individual type of ramp operation, with the intention of “identifying systemic issues wherever possible”, proposing solutions and implementing them.
Solutions
The first three general categories under examination (see above) remain part of all phases, but an additional area of study is introduced in phase two regulatory aspects. Vandel says no-one has examined whether the regulation that applies specifically to ramp safety is appropriate and effective. Unlike Joppart’s belief that ICAO Annex 14 and good practice based on it is probably all the regulation the industry needs, the FSF plans to keep an open mind until it has examined how ramp safety is regulated and overseen in practice at international, national and local levels.
In phase three the FSF will use the results of the phase two analysis to draw up a closed-loop safety management system for ramp operations. The FSF and its partners will recommend standards within the basic components that could influence ramp safety: operations/equipment, training and management – plus an audit programme, and finally regulatory standards and recommended practices.
If the FSF succeeds in leading an industry programme that finally makes a positive impression on ramp accident numbers, severity and cost, it will have tamed the one remaining area of anarchy in the hyper-controlled world of commercial aviation operations.
DAVID LEARMOUNT/LONDON
Source: Flight International