M.Mouse;
Your SESMA Program is a model for all those wanting an effective and appropriate flight data monitoring system. You are correct - BA began doing data monitoring on the BAC111 in the late 50's. The program, and your safety culture, grew out those early processes.
As we built ours, we spent time at your Compass Center viewing the facilities, guided by Mike Holtom. Your safety culture remains a model for all others, notwithstanding differing views offered here. Among notable others such as Lufthansa, QANTAS was (and hopefully remains) such an example.
It is heartening to hear such observations about one's own company which are backed up by independant, experienced observations by outsiders. Yes, it is expensive and today that is all the executives and accountants are looking at. I post what I do about FOQA/FDA precisely because FDA is NOT expensive "on balance" and that it does indeed work.
It is starting to work at our organization in spite of, not because of management because it is the pilots, who want the program and not the executive or Flight Operations management who are anything but overtly supportive or even knowledgable about the program. We've been at it ten years now and they still have no clue, no comprehension and thereby no basis upon which to champion the program. It is as though we don't exist - all we are, are "expensive resources" and, frankly, an unwelcome intervention in their operation.
The safety culture is admirably "non-punitive", they have an excellent safety policy, ASR reporting us shooting up but they simply don't know what to do with FOQA data and when something serious did happen, they didn't believe the data. There are varying degrees of "buy-in" of course, the where it counts - at the executive and the senior management levels, there is no formal "push" and no overt, "public" support. They don't think anything can happen. They seem, as Pink Floyd's lyrics go, "comfortably numb".
Thanks for your post.