AF 447 Thread No. 10

[PJ2]

Hunter58;

Thanks for your response.

Regarding "management" and "Flight Operations Management" - First, as the CEO goes so goes the airline's corporate culture and priorities. If the CEO broadcasts that he or she will not tolerate compromise in safety standards and demands a healthy safety reporting culture, it will happen. If the CEO broadcasts the view that cost-control-at-all-cost is the priority, his lieutenants will ride out and do the CEOs bidding. It is the way bureaucracy, job security, promotion, and egos, work. The airline/corporate culture adopts the approach that the CEO broadcasts.

If the CEO does not have a comprehension of the aviation business and, more importantly, what keeps it safe, then there is little that operations, the safety department or the broader culture can do to counter picayune priorities that are set by the executive leadership.

The unspoken but not subtle belief conveyed is, "the business has to stay in business", and where there is normalization of deviance (cutting corners, "doing the right thing according to corporate values especially where there are no untoward outcomes), that is the corporate culture that will grow and which becomes "invisible" because it is "the way we do things." In such a culture, a serious incident or accident is unexpected and therefore is always a complete surprise, and blame not comprehension is the usual outcome in such cultures.

Now within that structure, certainly senior management, even operations management, can retard the retreat towards pure cost control, (which takes safety for granted). In fact in my experience that's how it works, to a greater/lesser degree. Those in the business know that a perfectly safe operation isn't possible without staying on the ground but running the business does not afford the time to understand..."there's a business to run". I have known CEOs who had absolutely no clue how flight safety actually worked to keep their aviation business safe - the apparent comprehension appeared in discussion and in print from the executive offices to be at the very rudimentary "have everyone wear safety vests while on the ramp" level. There was little understanding at senior management levels of the notion of the organizational accident, threat-and-error management and the importance of the basics, (as per Lonewolf_50's post).

Operations may be at the coal face and may be the only ones who truly comprehend what is required in an ongoing safety culture but if Operations does not have the active, involved support of the CEO, then they are limited, primarily by stature, (meaning, Marketing is more privileged than Operations or Maintenance), within the corporation and by budget contraints (and the subtle pressures which attend such dynamics) in their effectiveness and ability. In such cultures, flight safety departments are usually viewed as dead-end career-path choices.

These situations aren't static of course. People change with new awarenesses and I saw that too. The flight data program, very late in coming, was ignored for years until that kind of behaviour actually became a liability. When something showed up in the data they wanted to know "who that pilot was" so they still didn't get it. In this particular example data is slowly being valued and makes changes in SOPs so change does occur.

What is obvious to those who do flight safety work is not at all obvious to those who must run the business, and vice versa. That's neither good nor bad, it's a challenge...for both groups.