As a former member of the RAAF Directorate of Flight Safety (DFS) decades back, our office published a flight safety magazine called "Spotlight." It was not a flashy publication. There were no colours, occasional photos of accidents and cheap to produce and effective. It was full of accident and incident reports from RAAF, USAF and RAF sources. At the time there was only six RAAF staff at DFS which was in Canberra
"Spotlight" was very popular among airmen and ground staff alike and copies could always be found in crew rooms at each RAAF base. I don't recall any in waste paper bins in the squadrons I served with. At the same time, the Royal Air Force produced a flight safety magazine, "Air Clues" which founds its way to Australia and widely distributed among RAAF bases. Air Clues became collector's items over the years - rather like Aviation Safety Digest by Mac Job, in Australia. The attraction to pilots of ASD, the early RAAF Spotlight and Air Clues magazines lay in their interesting and easy to read layout.
In Pprune over the past few years, there have been numerous posts about the excellent reading available in the old DCA "Aviation Safety Digest" flight safety magazine. in contrast, its replacement "Flight Safety Australia," has come under criticism by its readers for too much advertising and general too flashy layout and not much in the way of accidents to get one's teeth into.
Reading the latest (December 2013) Australian Defence Force "Aviation Safety Spotlight," magazine, I was disappointed to see the magazine is in the hands of over-enthusiastic graphic designers with page after page wasted with huge headlines and images taking up nearly 80 percent of pages. But it was the American corporate speak with its weasel words that struck me.
If you don't know what I mean, go to the library and read "Death Sentence -The decay of Public language" by Don Watson. He attacks corporate speak that makes no sense to outsiders, and confounds even those who use it - it is a dead language; devoid of lyric or comic possibility, incapable of emotion, complexity or nuance. His words, not mine.
For example on page 32 of "Spotlight', there are promos for flight safety courses with the heading "Safety Culture Program 2014" adapted from the "very effective and validated United States Naval Safety Center Program. It claims the Safety Culture Workshop "enhances safety performance through operational excellence; built on a foundation of trust, integrity and leadership, created and sustained through effective communications. It is a discrete, frank and independent look in the
`organisational mirror` to see whether the reflection matches the perceived /desired reality" Huh?
Wait- there is more of this stuff. For instance, page 30 has another promo called "Empowered Accountability and Error Control" and lists two half-day sessions looking at: "Insights into life-changing errors, the role of personal accountability in the world of system safety, the mind body link: the physiology and psychology of human performance, mechanisms to counter Blue Threat error-producing conditions and countermeasures., discipline and compliance: the cornerstone of professionalism"
Or you can attend another course also on page 30 called "Going Pro - The Deliberate Practice of Professionalism" in which you will learn about the "Going Pro Quickstart Toolkit" that defines "the domains and standards of professionalism, raises the level of awareness across all six domains of Level 111 professionalism, set an initial benchmark against which to measure continuous improvement, develop and implement a personalised continuous improvement process" Then you will be pleased to know that all this stuff is "ideally delivered post completion of the empowered accountability and error control workshop and based upon contemporary work of Dr Tony Kern"
I wonder how many Defence Force people who get "Spotlight" glance through it then consign it to the bin like so many civilian pilots do to Flight Safety Australia magazine?