The Importance Of Safety Risk Management

A large part of the Director of Safety’s job is to analyze statistics. Accident rates, cost-benefit analysis, risk analysis, hazard analysis, etc. just scratches the surface on the data analyses involved in running a safety program. An understanding of how accident statistics are compiled, and what they mean will better equip the safety director in keeping a healthy safety program.

Accident Rates A common practice in calculating accident rates is accidents per flight hour. When considering the data from Boeing on accidents from 1959-2013, there is a disparity between the accident rate per flight hour and accident rate per departure. According to Boeing, there were a total of 1859 major accidents in the airline industry over the course

Risk is the probability that an event will occur. A hazard is an event that may cause injury, damage to equipment, loss of material or deduction of ability to perform a certain function (Rodrigues & Cusick, 2012). In a way, the two go hand in hand. In aviation safety, risk is quantified to find the probability of a hazard occurring. In many cases, the hazard can also be quantified by degree of severity. This is known as Safety Risk Management (SRM) in terms of SMS. A risk assessment can be achieved by using a similar matrix as the one above. A range of number values will be assigned to the frequency of occurrence of the risk. For example, using one through five, one being infrequent, and five being the most frequent will generate the value for how often a person is exposed to a hazard. At the same time, the hazard will be assigned a number value for severity of the hazard. Once again, the range will be one through five, one being negligible, and five being catastrophic. This is considered a 5x5 matrix (Rodrigues & Cusick, 2012). The report is prepared by multiplying the frequency number value by the severity number value, and getting a number between one and twenty five. Typically an activity between one and six will be considered low risk, which is acceptable. A number between seven and twelve can be considered medium risk, which is undesirable, so a management decision will need

Not necessarily the highest paid management in the corporate ladder or the engineers who design aircraft. These experts work on the aircraft or fly them every single day. These experts are the very employees that the department is trying to keep safe. Some of the best data comes from the very people who work at the air carrier because they see the day to day operations every day. One way to get this data is by issuing anonymous opinion surveys to all personnel (Wood, 2003). These opinion surveys are designed to get workers or pilot’s expert opinion in an honest manner. This is why anonymity is so important. Some effective questioning on these surveys can be, for example, what they think the next accident will be caused by. Also, a follow up to that would be what can be done to prevent it. Some other subjects to tackle could be their opinion on the safety program. Also, what can be done to improve it, or what standards are being followed or ignored? This line of questioning can be very helpful in analyzing the current state of the safety program. The key here is to see what the people who are in the thick of operations are doing, and how they are operating. Safety data analysis is useful in the ability to quantify safety expenditures, as well as putting a numerical value to the risk factor of certain activities within the organization. These numbers can be used to justify expenditures