GW;
Summary of the above: many airline managers may be well-intentioned but desperately ill-prepared for the job.
Precisely.
With a few notable exceptions, (native ability/intelligence/experience) it was the same where I worked as well. Those that went into management were often very junior, intent on improving their working conditions by controlling what their "juniority" could not, or getting a promotion (bigger airplane or a left-seat job which their seniority would not permit outside line pilot seniority). That's not a cynical opinion nor is it intended to slam management personnel. That's what happened, routinely - it's how middle management was (and is) usually staffed. The experienced ones flew the line and kept their head down because they knew the work was thankless with little support from above, the politics were distracting and sometimes risky to one's advancement, and the monetary benefits minimal.
All this said, your point is exactly on the mark - by virtue of the absence of formal training, mentoring or internship programs for such a purpose, most airline management below the senior and executive levels are ill-prepared for the work and do indeed make very conservative decisions, (I have written about this problem before in relation to SMS and the need for courageous but expensive safety decisions and will not repeat comments here), but are, in almost every case, extremely well-intentioned.
Again, the Challenger-Columbia accidents and the dynamics at NASA in both cases are highly instructive and I would commend anyone interested/fascinated with these dynamics to find and read the following texts for a solid, far better reading than we can offer here on a complex, often-ignored subject: the factors, characteristics and issues here being discussed. The books are:
The Challenger Launch Decision, Diane Vaughan, Chicago Press;
Organization at the Limit, Moshe Farjoun, William Starbuck, Blackwell
As mentioned before,
Sidney Dekker's books are of immense value in putting flesh to the points raised here.
Just Culture and
The Field Guide to Understanding Human Factors are both well worth the investment in careful reading.
In particular GW, your point regarding the well-intentioned manager is made a number of times in the first two works cited above, the point being of course, that "amoral calculation" (Vaughan, 1996) is not a factor in accidents and instead "the best of intentions" is cited along with the valuable notion, the "normalization of deviance", a human factor with which we are all familiar in our daily lives but which, because we are so accustomed to such justifications for change, is invisible in high-risk environments, a factor which is exacerbated by the aforementioned lack of specialized, focused training for flight operations management personnel.
lomapaseo;
Re,
It's not useful to highlight the airline CEO or even the bean counters when discussing safety. They have their jobs to do and it isn't to lead or even to promote regarding safety. Their best roll is a supporting roll. The promotion and leading of safety has to be done by people who understand the differences between risk and safety.
Hm, I think you will find that most safety literature will disagree with your assessment that the role of executive management is not to lead and/or promote safety within the organization they are responsible for. To be sure, (and I have been careful to qualify this thought a number of times), it is not necessary that they be safety specialists or even knowledgeable about the intracacies of flight safety work; I even agree that their main responsibility is indeed to ensure the commercial health of the enterprise - obviously safety is immaterial to a grounded, bankrupt carrier.
But if the organizations managers/employees are receiving the message straight from the top that "safety doesn't count when commercial or scheduling pressures are high, employee productivity is always a concern or maintenance "delays" keep airplanes in the hangar for "too long", (I'm exaggerating I know - such "messages" are almost always far more subtle but again, I'm trying to keep posts to a reasonable length and not succeeding very well), you may be certain that those messages will be acted upon by well-intentioned managers, not because they are apple-polishing but because, "that is the way things are done here".
If however, an organization has a healthy safety culture, not "led" but "engendered" within the organization from the very top, then managers know that they will be supported when a critical SMS-driven decision runs counter to the organization's commercial interests and priorities. One thing is a bureaucratic and psychological certainty within the social network and structure of an organization - an employee will invariably listen to the message delivered by his/her boss than by a trainer or safety specialist.
That is what is meant by CEO's/beancounters etc "understanding safety". If an executive only knows, say, marketing, then all problems and solutions are seen within a marketing "discourse" and may be wholly inappropriate in terms of support for sufficient resources. The role of the CEO/President etc, cannot be underestimated but it should not be confused with the need for "subject-matter-expertise". One can lead, motivate and support quite effectively even if one is not an expert in one or another fields. In fact, that is the very definition of "manager". This is what is meant by holding the CEO accountable for leadership in safety.
I would like to address your second point,
An organization needs the equivalent of an ombudsman who tracks items that identify risk, unsafe practices and has a process that brings to bear corrective actions that manages identified risk items to a level of safety commensurate with the rest of the industry. Sure it's nice to be risk free or perfectly safe (in your own mind) but you'll only dream of this. But woe to the organization that allows itself to be perceived as less safe than others.
So look around you, who in your organization is the person responsible for identifying risky practices and promoting actons to correct these? The bigger the organization the bigger the staff, but it sure ain't the CEO or a bean counter staff. I've come to believe that it really is some of you on this board. But I don't like to hear about inpediments in this process that have us pointing fingers away from ourselves with the idea that it's somebody else job and they just don't understand what they are doing.
If I might respectfully offer, the "ombudsman" you describe is the organization's flight safety department and the tracking and risk assessment activities are the various flight safety programs created, put in place and properly, effectively resourced and then actually employed and otherwise hearkened to by the organization's flight operations department. The establishing of such programs and the appropriate resourcing of same is not the responsibility of safety people - it is the CEO's/beancounters' responsibility to ensure such programs are created and sufficiently resourced. That has been my point all along, perhaps poorly expressed at times!
But examination of the point you make regarding how such an "ombudsman" would work within an organization in terms of authority and independance of voice must be taken further.
The assumption is, the safety people in place to risk and trend assess
will actually be listened to, their and their safety programs' input taken seriously, and their authority to interdict in a number of established and accepted ways. This is a somewhat idealistic expectation and does not always obtain. The notions of "box-ticking" and "pushing rope" express real manager and employee frustrations with an absence of what seems should be an obvious involvement. Such engagement simply cannot be taken as given. Both the Challenger and Columbia accident reports indicate this as do the more enlightened and broadly-conceived reports on accidents including Moshansky's Report on the Air Ontario Dryden accident. Ignoring flight data was cited as a causal factor at, of all carriers, QANTAS, in their overrun accident at Bangkok. I have witnessed flight data which indicated a very serious airframe exceedance sent to all relevant departments including operations and maintenance but which was summarily ignored in favour of dispatching the aircraft. I can assure you, without details, that we were not silent but it took a significant intervention over a relatively long period of time to obtain appropriate action though all after the fact. So there is not an automatic relationship between any "ombudsman" to use your term and the operations people but the appearance and subsequent illusions of same may lead one to believe it so if not examined for what it is.
In fact, under a de-regulated SMS environment in Canada, the US and elsewhere, where SMS documentation and accreditation (IOSA, for example) are perhaps viewed by CEOs/beancounters as sufficiently acceptable measures and even sought after (the
accreditation game), and which may be imbued perhaps greater importance than actually seeing/knowing what is going on within their organization, it is not unreasonable to observe, given a host of recent accidents the nature of which has not been seen before at least in such frequency, that we have a safety system at significant risk of further deterioration.
In pointing to pilots as responsible entities, I think you re-state a valuable factor which requires highlighting;- that it is "us" indeed and as well, who must maintain our guard. This is a systems approach, not a component approach. While management must always lead, (unions, employees, even the regulator, do not and cannot ultimately lead - effective leadership for a safety culture must always emanate straight from the top), employees and their respective representatives are not bystanders but integral contributors and, in many cases where priorities are seen to be imbalanced, responsible for intervention whether singular or structural. Flight crews are "at the coal face" and are in the best position to provide feedback. Pilot unions have a long history of flight safety involvement but, just as companies will place commercial priorities higher, unions often place industrial matters as higher priorities than the less sexy and "pedantic" safety agenda. While pilots and their representatives play a significant role in regulatory reform, aircraft and procedural design, procuring volunteers or arranging displacements from flying so that such work can be done is often problemmatic in terms of resources. So I think your point in this is well taken - we indeed have a large and unavoidable responsibility.
In the end however, the metaphor of "pushing rope" is applicable. If the CEO doesn't want it or doesn't make it hurt if a certain tolerance for compromise in flight safety occurs or is established within the organization, there is little that pilots, unions, or even the regulator can do.
kind regards as always,
Oakape;
But because most CEO's these days are not the aviation people of years gone by, they do not understand the importance of this. CEO's these days jump from one position to another & from one industry to another quite regularly. Their skills are seen as readily transferable & not industry specific now. This generally works out Ok in most industries, but the quite unique nature of the aviation business seems to be no longer understood.
I have mentioned this here before but I heard it straight from a very senior Boeing manager involved in flight safety work that in his experience today's airline CEO's know little to nothing about flight safety or even the engineering/technical aspects of aviation or aircraft purchasing and thus are very difficult to communicate with or talk to concerning the matters raised in this thread, all of which have serious relevance for the organization of which one is CEO. It was for me, a disappointing confirmation of my own experience where I once worked and is, in my view, with other equally serious issues, near the heart of the presently-unfolding issues being discussed here.
PJ2