Shell Management
I find the tone of your communications quite shocking really. Aggressive, arrogant and lacking any knowledge of aviation matters.
An interesting statement you made was
It is SO frustrating to spend so long devising and promoting the only clear way to protect yourself from a court case to see others ignorantly fail to take up best Shell practice.
perhaps that is the fundamental difference between our professions. In aviation we devise safety and training systems designed to protect us from loss of life and loss of aircraft, and any impact on the earnings of the legal profession is an aside and of no consequence to our primary safety aim.
You are procedure driven, indeed apparently procedure mad. The problem with procedures is that you can write them, reams of them for everything, yet people still break them, and as a result an incident may occur. The trick is understanding, truly understanding the reasons WHY people break procedures and then working with that and your most important asset, your people.
I have worked in the aviation safety industry for over 12 years, prior to a full career as a pilot, and one of the reasons I believe there are so few inputs on this particular thread is that the whole aviation attitude to safety, CRM and Human Factors has become embedded in to our everyday professional lives. I would not say we sit back on our laurels, far from it, but we have got the major part of the problem licked, and we strive to continually improve that.
In the future of aviation the only logical path forward will be that the percentage of accidents caused by Human Error will increase. There can be no other conclusion as the machines are becoming more reliable, our understanding of material science more thorough and our maintenance and NDT procedures more trustworthy with components being replaced before any predicted failure can occur. So the only weak link in all of that is the Human machine interface. Our aim in the short term should be to strive for scientific and engineering excellence with the machine, and we will be in the situation where almost 100% of aircraft accidents will be caused by Human Error. Whilst that may sound alarming, what we have also done is to reduce significantly the physical
'number' of accidents. In the 1950's there were hundreds/thousands of aircraft accidents every year, but for all the reasons stated above that number has now reduced to a handful effectively.
We have done well to eradicate the very aggressive self righteous attitudes from our Pilots on an
inflated driver“s salary or perceived status.
that used to exist in the 60's and 70's that you so magnificently display in your posts. You really really need to start working on 'the people' because if your attitude is representative of those in your industry then you still have massive problems that lie ahead.
You state that your concern is
The safety of the travelling public
well if that is truly the case then relax! Aviation is the safest form of travel on the planet today, and it has never been safer, testimony to the excellent work done by our pilots, and flight crews, maintenance technicians and support staff world-wide. We have tried to encourage the rail industry for a long time to adopt similar training of key staff as in aviation. Well you inform us that the rail industry has adopted 'safety cases' and whilst that is delightful news, it does not address the individuals understanding of why they will fall asleep at the controls, or the cognitive failures that will result in the driver seeing a 'green light' when it was infact 'red'. Safety cases are but one piece of armour that can be put in place to prevent a life critical or business critical failure, but rather like the knight on the battlefield who only wears a steel boot and nothing else, whilst his foot will stay safe the rest of him is somewhat exposed to danger.
I have worked with the largest off shore aviation companies in the world, and the picture is not as rosy in your industry as you paint it to be. Your industry is system mad and study mad and it shows from what you have said. A friend of mine had £60K to spend on safety training of teams for exploration rigs in the icy north. We sat for hours looking at the lessons from aviation and what he could achieve with some communication training and looking at the effects of fatigue on Human performance and decision making etc. Seventeen years of work already carried out by the aviation industry with the lessons there to be plucked for free, and what does the PhD Geophysicist do? Correct he spends £55K on an academic study from a University on why Human Error occurs. He still admits today that his decision to do that was a human error.
We do not continually discuss all of this SM because as said before it is now embedded in our culture.
You may also wish to reflect upon your 'style'. Their are many many definitions of Leadership, but in its simplest form it could be said to be 'the ability to get the best out of your people for any given situation'. I absolutely assure you that if your 'style' is as we see here on this forum, then on a day to day basis you will never get the best out of people.
Anyway, enough said. Perhaps you ought to look seriously at the cracks in your own industry before trying to fix ones in another. People who live in glass houses and all that.
Of course if you need assistance with implementing these wonderful strategies from aviation then you can always pm me
By the way just as a point worthy of note. The article you link to (you're not cliff are you?) says
Unless significant
changes are made to improve the nearly
flat accident rate, by 2010 there could be
an average of one airline accident per
week.
Well it is in fact 2010, and I appreciate I may not have my ear close enough to the ground in my own industry, but I don't think we are having on 'average' one airline accident per week. Mind you as I have experienced for years it is only such alarmist BS that the magazines deem fit to print.