Create and maintain a safety culture

1. Leadership: Communication from senior leadership stressing their commitment to a safety culture is imperative. This commitment sets the tone for the whole organization, and emphasis should be placed on a non-punitive culture that encourages pilots to report safety concerns.
2. Accountability: Examine and assess the roles and responsibilities of each stakeholder in a group. The roles include how these individuals interact with others in the organization. The responsibilities include requirements to successfully fulfill the roles as well as the limits of an individual’s authority (i.e., can they cancel a flight, ground a flight, authorize a flight?).
3. Risk: Identify and assess the risks and unique issues associated with the operation. Then, create meaningful mitigation strategies that realistically can be implemented.
4. Reporting: Create a reporting system or promote the use of a system that already exists. A reporting system can be paper based, or web based—either way, it must be usable for the organization. A usable reporting system needs a standard form to report safety issues, a means to submit the report, a place to collect the reports, and a means of distribution of findings across the organization.
5. Culture: The goal of the SSF is ultimately to create an organization-wide safety culture that encourages reporting, rewards safe actions and behaviors, and keeps the entire organization (not just the leaders) engaged and involved in correcting issues.

Safety is everyone’s responsibility—help your aviation group by developing your own Scalable Safety Framework. Download the presentation from our Safety to Go portal.