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.
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A hazard might not be mitigable when the risk assessment is not analyzed at appropriate level.
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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.
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When imagination is filled with endless opportunities of directions; then focus on the task assigned.
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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
With the pressures of getting to flights out and serving the customer, we often fail to communicate properly. No SMS system can function without "Robust" communication between all teams in an enterprise. It all stems back to defining what is "normal" in your processes and then discussing the variations that occur. BirdsEye gives us a good reminder of the importance of communication.
ReplyDeleteNOTE: Tools for communication can be found in the SMS memory Jogger II. You can get yours at dtitraining.com click on the store.