Runway at BRS was unsafe.

[Pinkman]

Helen 49 - Excellent Post

You describe to a T the problem with ALL safety, health and environment management systems and risk assessments, whether proscribed by CAP, ISO, EMAS, etc etc

Having a safety system and conforming to a standard does not mean you are safe. It USUALLY means that there is some kind of consistency of documentation that purports to demonstrate that you have achieved a certain standard at some point in the recent past, but doesn't necessarily tell you about the exceptions and the culture, which are key determinants of safety.

That is why when you see exceptions such as the TAP whiteout examples on Maintainance reports (elsewhere on PPrune), while the individual exception per se may be trivial, any decent systems auditor looking at that would straight away have the hairs on the back of his/her neck go up and start digging into the culture aspects.

The current regulatory trend to self-assessment coupled with management systems and risk-based regulatory audits does work if you have those audits done by competent people and they are not just a form filling exercise.

But the current example is even more basic. I am from the oil industry and not qualified to comment on the AAIB report; I am sure that the AAIB conclusions are correct but I was surprised that there was not more explanation of causality and culture to enable learning points for other operators to be bought out so this doesn't happen again. That would include a re-statement of best practices and an explanation of the detailed procedures for risk assessment. Would be interested to have the benefit of Overrun's and other's opinion.

A quick read of "The safe management of civil airfield pavements" - Barling & Fleming's excellent 2005 paper - would have told Bristol most everything they needed to know to plan and execute the maintenance according to best practices and regs outlined by CAP, the ANO, and BAA, or at least realize that they needed to employ someone who could manage that process. There are templates there and loads of good information. It took me - a non-specialist - five minutes to find it on the internet and an hour and a half to read and understand it.

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