SM, “Safety cases, as invented by the oil industry, have been shown to be the best way to manage high risk industries.” Really?
Safety Cases were intended to be an aid to thinking about risk, not an end in themselves. Haddon-Cave?
Also, a hazard of claiming invention is that someone will probably cite earlier work, e.g. Patrick Hudson of Leiden University who was contracted by Shell.
The oil and gas industry do appear to have taken a lead with safety initiatives; see:-
Hearts and Minds - Home
OGP Risk Management Homepage
(which I suspect that SM is well aware of)
A weakness in aviation could be in not having a centralised coordinator (other than a regulator) for this type of work; cf ‘The Energy Institute’. Thus there may be material ‘knowledge’ gaps between what is published by regulators – the minimum requirement, and what should be used as best practice.
How can the investigators (NTSB / AAIB) be responsible (“their backward ways”) for regulation. Its not their mandate. Investigators are faced with the facts after an event, the regulators, as with operators, have to promote safety beforehand, and if found wanting, implement the investigators findings.
“BP failed to use a safety case in the US. Just proves the point.
A bit presumptions; lets wait for the full story.
Whilst in this instance BP might not have used industry best practice, it appears that they provided sufficient safety / risk information for an operating licence to be granted. This implies that the ‘regulator’ (and government) knew what was happening; now reconsider the share of responsibility.
Aviation (every industry) should be able to learn from the BP’s problems, but learning requires understanding and application.
”This is something the airline industry doesn´t do.”
Again presumptuous. Just because a process is not visible it doesn’t imply that SMS / risk assessments in some form are not in use.
The aviation industry (with a few exceptions) is recognised as a high reliable industry – an
‘ultra safe system’ (Amalberti); the oil and gas industry is not always associated with this category.
With high levels of safety, an industry requires new and often novel ways of thinking just to maintain the status quo.
Thus heed “Safety Cases were intended to be an aid to thinking about risk, not an end in themselves,” the important issue is to think about risk; how the thoughts are acted on – safety case, SMS, or otherwise – is of lesser importance.