Fundamentals of Safety Management

Over the past 70 years, our approach to safety management has changed. Back in the early 50s,
safety was concerned primarily with the investigation of accidents; a very reactive process.
Eventually, there was the recognition that humans and human performance were a significant
contributor to aircraft accidents; to this day, human factors influence some 80% of events.

Other factors influence the human condition such as the effects of organisational policy (cost
cutting, fatigue inducing roster patterns etc.). Furthermore, the general company culture could
result in adverse human performance especially those with a “why fix it if it is not broken”
attitude. An airline must embrace and promote an enterprise-wide safety culture.

Modern safety systems will assess all potential root causes of an incident including a
thorough drill upwards through the company to determine if there are other
organisational or cultural factors at play. Clearly, management have to conduct a careful
balancing act between protection and commercial production as shown in the diagram
below (Source: James Reason). To much focus on protection can limit the operation to
the point of bankruptcy, whereas overstretching limited resources to achieve high levels
of production can cause mistakes and errors which may lead to serious incidents. By
carefully balancing financial and safety management, managers can confine their
operation within the "Safety Space".