Erosion of Safety Margins?

[Captain Stable]

As airlines find they are having increasingly to look to their cost margins to stay competitive, resulting in severe cost-cutting measures in many areas, there is a danger that safety margins in the way we operate may be reduced.

As a totally unofficial straw poll, your attention please, ladies and gentlemen to a few questions:-

1) What factors do you feel can be cut without eroding safety margins to limits that would alarm either us, the press or the travelling public?

2) What limits would you impose on where the final line is to be drawn? If you like, what is your personal TPF (Total Pucker Factor)?

3) Before implementing any changes, should there be some form of guidance provided to management and beancounters from some senior representative of the affected departments (FD, CC, Eng. etc.)?

4) With recognition of erosion of safety margins by cost-cutting measures, should the powers of the regulatory authorities (RA's) be beefed-up?

5) What, if any, additional powers should be granted to RA's over possibly lower-standard foreign operators?

[Cathar]

4) In the UK the CAA's powers are very wide and I doubt that they need to be increased. If safety margines are being eroded, the issue is likely to be the lack of identification of the problem rather than the lack of powers to address it.

5) International aviation is governed by the Chicago Convention This sets minimum safety standards for airlines and establishes that the regulation of an airline is the responsibility of the state in which it is based. European states appear to have the power to check foreign airlines' compliance with international standards and are actively cooperating in this respect. See http://www.jaa.nl/safa/safa.html

[lomapaseo]

For the most part your safety margins are like an iceberg in water. 25% is visible above the surface and 75% is out of sight below the surface. The fact that it simply bobs along this way damn near eternity is the proof of the general order of safety nicely overseen by our regulators with the help of ICAO.

In order for the iceberg to turn over, you would have to have a major change below the surface since it is implied that the top part is nicely symetrical to the eyes of the Feds and ICAO.

Long before the stuff below the surface changes enough to affect safety, the dispatch reliability of the fleet would get so bad that you would lose customers in droves.

Unfortunately I have seen a couple of airlines let the bottom of the iceberg get so bad that their dispatch reliabilty went to hell. Since I also had some tracking ability on this kind of stuff, We were able to pay a visit to their safety department and present some daming evidence which sure woke them up

[OzExpat]

Impossible questions CS. Whatever might be acceptable to cut in the operation of a piston-engine aircraft or turboprop aircraft may not be acceptable in a jet. In any event, I tend to agree with Cathar and lomapaseo - the minimum standard in everything is the rule book, whatever your aviation regulator defines that to be.

And I stress "minimum standard". I suspect that there are a few circumstances where I'd be getting worried long before we reach that "minimum standard". However, that is what your regulator looks at, tho they ARE entitled to assess any company on their own standards, as written in Ops Manuals, SOPs, etc., where these are higher than those in the rule book.

The real point is not whether the regulator has the power, but whether or not they can (or are willing to) enforce their own regulations.