Commendable safety improvements have been achieved in the air transport industry. But identifiable corners of anarchy remain
World air transport has seen considerable success in improving its safety performance, but this quantifiable fact has received very little acknowledgement. Perhaps it is taken for granted because safety has been getting better ever since aviation was born.
But there are some anarchic corners of aviation that remain defiantly resistant to the safety improvements that have been happening across most of the industry.
Gradually improving engineering and design, greater equipment reliability and smarter technology have always been the most influential drivers toward lower accident rates. Anyone in air transport could, with a moment’s thought, catalogue the step-change advances: wood and fabric to metal alloy structures; piston engines and propellers to turbojets and turboprops; turbojets to turbofans; mechanical control to digital fly-by-wire with flight-envelope protection.
In the early 1980s, with the arrival of the Boeing 757 and 767 and the Airbus A310, came the early glass cockpits and the use of digital computers to control systems. Digital cockpits have since become better designed, more reliable, increasingly capable, and pilots have gradually learned to make full use of them. By the 1990s, digital aircraft were not perfect, but they were having far fewer accidents than their forbears. Nevertheless, safety analysts’ unanimous cry at the time was that it was not possible to improve safety at a rate fast enough to counter the growth in the world airline fleet. There would be “a major accident per week”, they predicted. They were wrong. Why?
Apart from the improvements catalogued above, a single piece of equipment has played a large part: the terrain avoidance and warning system (TAWS). It has divided the world’s fleet into essentially two categories: TAWS-equipped, and non-TAWS-equipped. The former no longer have controlled flight into terrain accidents, which used to be frequent; the latter continue to have them. QED.
But TAWS and technology is not the sole reason for the continued improvement. The industry, via forum organisations like the Flight Safety Foundation (FSF), began to use the power of digital databases and data sources to gather and analyse – with a level of detail never possible before – what caused specific categories of accidents and incidents to happen. Using this, the industry developed systems for risk reduction that airlines could apply, monitor, and manage, including flight data monitoring.
This list of safety management improvements is far from exhaustive. So how, then, in this incredibly ordered, sophisticated world of air transport, are there corners of anarchy? One is easy to identify: in economically poor countries that have scant regard for their citizens’ safety in everyday life, airline safety culture normally reflects that, and so do accident figures. This is an intractable problem, but any solution to it must start at government level – the national aviation authorities should inspect airlines more often and be quicker to withdraw operating licences if standards are lax. This is not happening at present.
Theoretically less intractable are two sectors of the air transport industry that are not exclusively confined to poor economies with lax national safety cultures. There is still a continuing massive difference between the impressive safety figures for passenger jets compared with poor statistics for freighters of all kinds. The same is true of turboprop operators, whether passenger or cargo. There is no excuse for differences of this magnitude. Many freight carriers and turboprop operators have simply ignored what the rest of the industry has been doing. They must wake up to what can be achieved, and then achieve it.
Finally, there is the ever-intractable issue of ramp safety. Human injuries and deaths that could easily be avoided happen regularly on airport manoeuvring areas all over the world, and the cost to airlines of aircraft damage incurred in ramp operation is breathtaking. The FSF is engaged in organising a determined, data-based study to enable it to put ramp safety under the microscope for the first time, but they will need co-operation from operators. This chaotic environment is untypical of modern aviation, and the benefits to the industry of getting it under control could be enormous. Just do it.
Source: Flight International
