Airline safety and airline security have many things in common. One of them is that, if they are to improve, there has to be a viciously self-critical internal and external appraisal of why they are both stalled, and changes in the way everyday things are done.
Let's take safety first. A step-change for the better in airline safety performance took place around the year 2000, but this improvement was the result of safety management strategies developed during the 1990s, and all the fruits of these changes have now been reaped. Further advance depends on changing the way things are done. Change is needed particularly badly in the recurrent training of pilots. Serious accidents that could easily have been avoided occurred last year, and they will next year, too. The way in which, today, young pilots are expected to get their ab initio training is just plain wrong - and airlines know it. Only rich kids can afford to train themselves to commercial pilot licence standard. But airlines are so short of cash they are acting as if they are helpless.
They had better snap out of this because, if they don't, it will be their aeroplanes that crash. Governments can help by recognising that the knowledge and skills pilot training confers can be used in any number of ways apart from flying, so tax and other incentives to invest in it make sense. Aviation authorities can help by admitting it is time for recurrent pilot training to change because flying modern aircraft is very different from operating classic aeroplanes in relatively quiet airspace.
As for security, "change" was President Barack Obama's pre-election mantra, and it is to be hoped he will see that changes are applied at the US Department of Homeland Security and Transportation Security Administration.
He has been quick to see that the recent failure in the USA's security and intelligence system was mostly about failures of internal communication. TSA-watchers know that one of the agency's greatest weaknesses is its obsession with gathering information about ordinary passengers. But the potential for error, false alarms and the risk of losing needles of vital data in the haystack of information about harmless travellers all rise exponentially with data quantity, a fact that is lost on the TSA.
If the TSA did not exist it would have to be invented, so Obama needs to ensure it is fit for purpose.
In failing to blow up an airliner, Abdulmutallab may have done the world a favour.
Source: Flight International
