Performance Is Exceptional

Performance Is Exceptional

By OffRoadPilots 

Since most of the tasks goes right most of the time, every day performance goes unnoticed and viewed as unexceptional tasks. Airports and airlines fall into a trap to accept repetitious tasks as trivial tasks without considering the successful outcome and these tasks to be less important than complex special tasks assignments. Conventional wisdom is that organizational drift in safety is to drift away from safety in operation to unsafe processes. Drift is neutral and does not affect safety in operations to be improved or reduced. Since drift is neutral, safety improvements or safety reductions are neutral. A concept of an effective safety management system (SMS) is to implement changes for incremental, or continuous safety improvements. Continuous safety improvement is a statement applied to emotions. Such statements are often used in sales and marketing describing a new product or service to be new and improved, which implies that the prior product or service was old and inferior. Safety today does not become old and inferior tomorrow but is fluid and adaptable to external changes.

Continuous safety improvements are the practical drift and the practical compliance gaps. A practical drift is the difference between work imagined and work as actually performed. Work imagined are documented by organizational policies, processes, and procedures. The practical compliance gap is the difference in regulatory compliance in a static environment where nothing moves, and the regulatory non-compliance within a moving environment. When work imagined becomes the compliance standard for safety in operations, it is with an assumption that their systems, processes or procedures are perfect and fail-free. The practical drift system is a common cause variation within the system itself. An airline or airport operator must identify these variations for their SMS to conform to regulatory requirements. Regulatory requirements for the person managing the safety management system are to monitor trends, monitor corrective actions and monitor concerns of the civil aviation industry. Monitoring these tasks is to monitor the outcome, which is different than monitoring for compliance with work imagined.

Continuous, or incremental safety improvements are needed for operations to maintain oversight due to external and common cause variations in processes. A change that is done for the purpose of safety, may or may not be an additional benefit to safety in operations. That the safety card is played, e.g., implemented for safety reasons, is more hazardous to aviation safety than continue operations without changing anything.

Takeoff performance charts for gravel runway are different from performance charts for paved runways. Rolling resistance, sometimes called rolling friction or rolling drag, is the force resisting the motion when a body rolls on a surface. An aircraft rolling on a graveltop surface experiences higher resistance than an aircraft rolling on a blacktop surface. A new type of graveltop runways is the Thin bituminous surface runways classification. Gravel runways have successfully been used for decades in places where it is expensive to make runway pavement or concrete. When operating on gravel runways there are loadbearing restrictions, and there are aircraft performance restrictions. These restrictions are often viewed as a burden and a restriction to operations rather as an additional layer of safety. Gravel runways are located far away from emergency services should an incident occur, and there are airports where public emergency services do not exist. Operating with gravel runways restrictions is to adjust operations to geolocations, since hazards are identified locally. Aircraft weight restriction due to gravel operations is viewed as a trivial task restricting affecting business revenue, rather than for the exceptional performance task it is. Classification of thin bituminous surface runways is a change in classification only, from a gravel runway to a paved runway. With this change, aircraft maximum gross weight is allowed by the regulator to be applied to their takeoff and landing performance. Simplified, there is no changes or construction made to the gravel runway, so the runway remains the same as what it was prior to reclassification. After reclassification, an airline is considered “safe” for takeoff with the stroke of a pen only. The classification criteria itself acknowledges this flaw in performance requirements.

The thin bituminous surface runways are a broad class of surface treatments, which have a variety of performance characteristics. Newly built thin bituminous surface runways require sufficient curing time to provide a competent and durable operational surface. A class 3 pavements may be considered to meet the definition of a thin bituminous surface runway. Since a runway may be considered, is in itself an acknowledgement that there is no data available in support of compliance with all the requirements. In other words, and since the runway may, there are no gravel runways that actually meets the most stringent standard requirement for reclassification as defined. In addition, there performance data for the actual groundroll is not required to assess the validity of the reclassification.

Airport operators designates their most critical aircraft by aircraft group number, which is a numeric value of characteristics of the critical aircraft for which the aerodrome is supporting. The aircraft group number is determined by the critical aircraft wingspan or tail height. An aircraft group number is based on a paved runway surface, with a limited maximum gross weight capability. An airport operator may select an aircraft group number based on aircraft wingspan and tail height, but the standard is lacking a method to verify how an airport operator select an aircraft size based on runway surface performance, or aircraft landing and takeoff performance. The root cause hazard with reclassification to the thin bituminous surface runways is the opportunity for regional compliance by airport operators who wish to maintain gravel operations to reclassify their runway for airlines to operate out of their airport. The one airport operator who remain a gravel runway operator has the highest risk to loose business due to their takeoff and landing restrictions. In addition, they are unable to provide friction characteristics of a runway surface for a runway serving turbojet aircraft, and there are still many unanswered questions. On the other side, the person who was the driving force behind reclassification to thin bituminous surface runways, received a recognized award for the work. When exceptional performance of current processes remains unrecognizable, and risk levels are established by emotions, checkbox syndrome, or by social media likes, any changes to processes becomes its own worst enemy.

Work well done often goes unrecognized as an important work task since everything is operating normally, processes are ignored and discarded as every day normal tasks. Drift is often recognized as drift into unsafe conditions, but unrecognized drift into improved safety in operations is just as much a hazard to aviation safety as drifting into hazardous operating conditions. Hazards are predictable, while incidents and accidents are unpredictable.

For an incident to occur there are three conditions that must meet at the fork-in- the-road. The first condition is that an aircraft, vehicle, or person is performing a task beyond the limits of their capabilities. E.g. an aircraft requiring 3,000 feet takeoff distance is taking off from a 2,000 foot runway. The second condition to be met is recognition of past practices without recognizing special cause variations. E.g.an aircraft normally departs empty and fly to a longer runway for passengers and freight to be loaded but does not recognize the effect of partial loaded aircraft. The third condition is operational drift to complete a task within a defined timeframe. E.g. daily departure performance records are exceptional, but it is not recognized as exceptional since it occurs daily, and drift is occurring to recover lost time for on-time task completion. Capability limits may be skewed based on established operational requirements, just as the thin bituminous surface runway scenario that justified the change as safety improvement in operations, while the root cause of change is to move operational limitations. Past practices may be skewed by an induced level of urgency to complete, and drift to improvement goes unrecognized when emotions or external forces are applied to decisions.

When performance is exceptional, such as operating out of a gravel runway with performance restrictions, drift into improved runway surface condition is just as much a hazard as drift into acceptable practices.

OffRoadPilots