rgbrock1;
You say the two positions are mutually exclusive due, mainly, to the fact that Operations also has to control costs. But if safety takes a hit doesn't that eventually affect the "bottom line", costs and , indirectly, Operations?
It would seem to me anyway that all divisions of Safety within an airline organization should report directly to the CEO. Makes sense to me anyway. And eliminates the possibility of any filters being applied to safety reports.
Ops is concerned with daily costs and the longer-term operational priorities are driven by the bottom line, with an eye to safety but not a wholesale focus. The reporting structure described is the way many major carriers work and data and information "filtration" is a real factor in the knowledge base of the airline's executive leadership. I have seen this first-hand and know it to be true, even today, right now. Corporations are run on "good news" to keep the share price bolstered among many reasons, and bad news tends to contaminate the messenger who, after all, may have his/her own ambitions to rise in the bureaucracy.
These are largely latent factors in any organization and can be readily found and are as repeatable today as they were when the Challenger accident occurred in 1986. This is one area where organizational learning does not occur, simply because safety costs money and, but for rare instances, does not protect profit or shareprice.
The reliance is on the robustness of present systems which is not altogether a bad thing; such things as hiring policies, fuel and dispatch policies, enforcement of SOPs, dispatch flight watch/communications, an industry-standard safety reporting policy, (no discipline except in cases of negligence or egregious/intentional acts) and the use of collected safety information all contribute to a level of safety but two factors have been at work for some time now: the introduction of SMS, and the tremendous financial pressure all airlines are under, ostensibly since 2001 and certainly since October, 2008.
These factors will tend to compromise some systemic responses, will tend to atrophe communications on safety matters, will tend to cause "the safety message" to be suppressed because it is expensive and cannot in and of itself be "proven" to make an immediate, material difference, (so deferal is often the solution) and the CEO who is likely a non-aviation person from the outside or if from the industry will be a marketing specialist, etc is almost always fundamentally ignorant of flight safety work, what makes an airline safe or what programs can be of best long-term value and are worth supporting even if they point out the shortcomings of an operation.
There is a lot of ego involved in this and no one likes to show up at corporate safety board meetings and get his/her department pointed at with blunt data...so the "message" is suppressed, denied or ignored as "new fires" arise each day which need the time, attention and energy of a very thin management staff.
These are the principles in a nutshell. They are standard fare for anyone doing safety work and are the source of frustration to same because we can see where an accident is going to occur but we can't be specific as to when/how/why/what and that is the basis upon which safety work is dismissed.
The other reason is complexity - very, very few managers today are capable of dealing in complex understandings or systems outside of a narrow, highly-specialized area of knowledge or skill. Thus, the best attempts to communicate safety information must necessarily be dumbed down so much that the information is essentially useless for decision-making. The two curves (comprehension and data complexity) therefore never cross.
Enough drift. These are factors observable in many carriers. I do not say it applies to any specific one.