Information Programs to Support Safety Risk Management

This paper discusses various efforts to apply risk management methodologies more systematically in the worldwide aviation community. The paper notes that a crucial ingredient for effective safety risk management is good information. Thus, the bulk of the paper addresses programs that are underway in the worldwide aviation community to collect, analyze, and share information about daily operations, near misses, and successes to improve safety.

The paper notes the importance in the aviation community of including all sectors of the community in the efforts to develop effective information programs. The paper discusses several barriers that must be addressed in order for the sectors of the aviation community to work together on this endeavor. First, the legal concerns must be addressed to alleviate the concerns of potential participants that the information being collected, analyzed, and shared will not be used against them. Second, the hands-on front line personnel are one of the most valuable sources of the needed information, and the cultural barriers must be addressed to help assure that these people will participate by providing information. Third, the potential volume of data is so large that improved analytical tools must be developed to facilitate the conversion of large quantities of data into useful information. Fourth, effective means of sharing and using the information must be developed in order for the entire community to benefit from the information. Last but not least, in order for all sectors to work together, they must learn to trust each other that the purpose of collecting, analyzing, and sharing information is to improve the safety of the system, rather than for any entity within or outside of the aviation community to use it against them.

These processes of information collection, analysis, and sharing, and using information for better safety risk management, are very generic and have wide applicability to many industries, including not only other transportation industries, but other major industries, such as chemical manufacturing, nuclear power, and most notably, health care and national security. All of these industries face an increasing scarcity of resources to prevent mishaps, and the paper discusses efforts of the aviation community to work with these industries to share these scarce resources and avoid “re-inventing the same wheel.”