Flight Safety Begins At The Dinner Table

Flight Safety Begins At The Dinner Table

NOTE: This post is from one of our frequent contributors to this blog, "Birdseye59604."

Often risk assessments are conducted to mitigate obvious dramatic and dangerous situation

to aviation. But what effect do the every day trivial events have on flight safety? It's not only

disasters that could cause an incidents, but also positive and enjoyable events. A pleasant

conversation at the dinner table could distract and cause a human mind to drift away from

focusing on tasks. What takes place at the dinner table may be a contributing factor to the

outcome of next flight.

It's widely accepted in the aviation industry that disasters, catastrophic events and accidents

affects human behavior and decision making with a greater risk of an unplanned event. When

airplanes lift of the runway; passengers, staff and air traffic controllers have faith in the system

that no one had a dramatic experience affecting their job performance. However, the enjoyable

moments may also distract and make an impact human behavior.

A hazard might not be mitigable when the risk assessment is not analyzed at appropriate level.

Job performance is the quality of an end result of a task completed, based on defined

expectations. This result is documented, tracked, analyzed with an assessment of systems

involved in reaching an acceptable level. This quality of job performance begins with the dinner

table conversations.

Dinner conversations are both entertaining and educational, with subjects ranging from simple

conversations of discussing TV shows, to teenager issues or complex science fiction theories

that speed of darkness is infinite. There is no limits to what imagination may produce, and

these conversations may affect human behavior and eventually job performances.

When imagination is filled with endless opportunities of directions; then focus on the task assigned.

When an aircraft lifts off, being a small with one person on board, or mega-sized with over

300 passengers, the assumption is that the crew at the controls are focused to perform

beyond regulatory requirements to an acceptable safety level. If something does not goes

according to plans, the pilot is often the first one to be scrutinized. Dinner table conversations

may have an effect on job performances of other than pilot tasks, ranging from of aircraft

design, manufacturing, software programming, data entries and inputs, dispatch, or enterprise

operational control. Several manufacturing and technical systems have quality control

processes in place to discover errors before being applied and distributed into the process.

With the implementation of Safety Management System (SMS), operational control of flight

safety are achieved by applying a quality assurance program to capture errors before they are

applied in the process.

BirdsEye59604