Environmental Factors
By OffRoadPilots
When identifying contributing factors and root cause, an SMS enterprise considers human factors, supervision factors, organizational factors, and environmental factors. These factors support their safety management system (SMS) policy on which the safety management system (SMS) is based, goalsetting system, process to identify hazards, training system, reporting system, communication system, quality assurance system, audit system, and they support their tasks for airlines and airports to operate with a comprehensive and compliant safety management system.
Environmental factors are comprehensive factors affecting SMS, since there are several subcategories included. Environmental factors encompass geographical location, climate, ecological, illumination, terrain, natural accelerated events, operational environment, workplace, design, equipment, communication, and more. Within each subcategory there are multiple secondary categories, and complementary categories. Environmental factors can be scaled down to detail-reliability in processes. When details are defined, a process may be simplified for the end user.
Geographical locations are located within the four categories of airmasses. These airmasses are artic, tropical, polar, and equatorial. Arctic air masses form in the Arctic region and are very cold. Tropical air masses form in low-latitude areas and are moderately warm. Polar airmasses take shape in high-latitude regions and are cold. Equatorial air masses develop near the Equator and are warm. Secondary categories of the geo location subcategory are regional and local phenomena.
Regional and local phenomena include uninhabited areas located within any of the four airmasses.
The climate subcategory is the long-term pattern of weather in a region. Weather changes from hour-to-hour, day-to-day, month-to-month or even year-to-year. Regional weather patterns tracked for at least 30 years, are considered its climate.
The ecological subcategory is how landscape patterns are precisely described patterns into ecosystem units based on similar climate, landscape, vegetation, and soil conditions. This provides for a common ecological language and framework to classify ecosystem units and support land and resource management. Illumination, sunlight, and darkness are subcategories of environmental factors. Illumination may be hangar lighting, and type of lighting. Some types of lights may cause colors to blend, while other types are bright and causing shadows. Sunlight, or lack of sunlight, including grey zones, are factors affecting aircraft operations, and maintenance and flight crew performance.
Terrain is another environmental factor. Terrain ranges from the shorelines at the three coasts, tundra and the arctic, the level prairies, to rolling hills, the foothills and to the rugged and rocky mountains.
Some of the natural accelerated events are earthquakes, blizzards, floods, avalanches, mudslides, volcanic activity, thunderstorms, and more. Some subfactors may also overlap into other factors.
The operational environment is a subfactor of the environment. An operational environment is different than the workplace, it is about the workspace. An operational environment is allocating operational workspace in 3D, and measured in time (speed), space (location), and compass (direction). A workspace is flight crew chairs design, the time for a pilot to reach an item to complete a task, the location in the cockpit of the item, and its direction from the pilot’s chair. In the old PBY-5A (Canso), the two generator’s circuit breakers are placed on the bulkhead behind the captain. Should the “left” generator fail, it becomes the “right” generator for the pilots when pulling the breaker.
The workplace environment is the place where there is interaction between workers. It’s a location where you turn up for work, it is an office space, pilot’s room, maintenance hangar or locations where you meet co-workers, discuss work, brainstorm, conduct meetings, and get work done.
A design environment is the process of addressing surrounding environmental parameters when devising plans, programs, policies, buildings, or products. It seeks to create spaces that will enhance the natural, social, cultural, and physical environment of particular areas.
The communication environment is about tools used to communicate. The old way to call loudly across the room has changed and improved by using electronic communication means. Information technology department is communication environment tool to communicate effectively within the organization, and to maintain communication records.
Equipment is a subfactor of the environment and includes machines and equipment, people and manpower, materials, and measurement. The equipment itself could be an aircraft, a vehicle, a towing tug, maintenance tools, computers, manual calculator tools, and more.
Environmental factors are the outsider of the other three factors. Human factors, organizational factors and supervision factors are all in their own special way linked to human behavior.
The climate affects areas of both airline operations and maintenance, and airport operations. The aviation is operating daily between the South and the North Poles. Airport and runways may be ice or snow runways, dessert sand, rivers, lakes or just a narrow mountain trail. Maintenance is performed in suitable hangars, or outside in rain, snow, wind, and in places with extreme cold or extreme hot. In many areas there are still places with no or limited communication availability, except for using satellite telephone. An aircraft without the 406ELT is difficult to locate in any weather conditions. Bush pilots all over the globe have experienced accidents and destruction of airplanes. Over the years airplanes have crashed in the middle of nowhere in 40 below temperatures and 40 above, and some pilots survived, while other did not. The climate affects survival probabilities and rescue time. Climate may also cause illusions, such as mirages. Several years ago, a large aircraft crashed when the runway lights were “lifted up” by an inversion and the airport viewed as being closer than what it actually was. Operators, pilots, and maintenance crew working in these extreme climate areas deserve a medal of honor for overcoming challenges and providing excellent services to people who live here.
The ecological factor is affecting the aviation more and more every year. Over millions of years the climate has changed from ice ages to hot climate. Currently ecological factors are assigned the root case for the current climate. Regulations are changed to support these opinions and operators must maintain compliance for continued operations. Natural resources are assigned contributor factors to the climate, and that current use is deteriorating the ecological environment. Airports may not be able to build, or extend their runways to service increasingly larger aircraft, or to improve fuelling areas for time consuming refuelling. Ecological factors are a limiting factors for the future of aviation.
Illumination, sunlight, and darkness are factors affecting flight and maintenance operations. Aircraft need landing lights, airports need runway edge lights, and maintenance hangars need floodlights. Type of lighting source affects operational performance and compliance. In a maintenance hangar where the floodlights are of the old type, colors in the yellow spectrum blends in with their surroundings, and other parts transform to the grey color spectrum. Bright floodlights to resemble brightness of sunlight is needed for maintenance to perform their obligations. Strong illumination from landing lights is required for a pilot to view an extended length of the runway beyond the aircraft. Runway edge lights are required to define the limits of usable runway areas, and their intensity may vary depending on weather conditions.
Terrain is another environmental factor affecting airports, airlines, and maintenance activities. It might not be immediate obvious that terrain affects maintenance activities since most maintenance is performed inside a hangar. However, terrain affects the decision of where to build a hangar, and the loadbearing capacity for taxiway or taxiroute to the facility. For outside maintenance terrain is a crucial factor to work in a stable environment. A helicopter may be in need of maintenance on a mountain range, or somewhere in the boreal forest. Terrain affects airports and airport design. There are airports that do not meet the obstacle clearance limitations and therefore unable to be certified airports. Airlines my required travel several additional miles for approach procedures compliance, burn additional fuel and add time to the flight crew’s duty day.
Accelerated events affects airports and airlines both seasonally and regionally and are contained within a relatively limited area. Volcanic ash from one single volcano outbreak, may be the only event that affects aircraft operations globally. Snowstorms, hurricane, or tornadoes may be spread over a large area, but are relatively regionally limited to for the safe operations of an airport or aircraft.
The operational environment is an environment where personnel feel good about working. It is the place where a person is located, a place that is home-away-from- home, and it is the place a person enjoys coming every day. An operational environment is about performance and how processes are designed to be userfriendly and reliable repetitious.
The workplace environment is different than the operational environment, in that it is designed by the six-sigma principle. The six-sigma is a set of methodologies and tools used to improve business processes by reducing defects and errors, minimizing variation, and increasing quality and efficiency. The goal of Six Sigma is to achieve a level of quality that is nearly perfect, by being tailored to human behaviors. A structured approach is to define, measure, measure, analyze, and improve applying the principles in their SMS safety risk management.
A design environment is a fluid environment where persons are tailored to individual and specific needs. An example is the popularity of a standing work-desks. A design environment is not to adapt to personal opinions and request daily, but to assess their inquiries as it relates to their work environment. Several years ago, a pilot was not allowed to fly bush planes with clogs, since this caused a hazard to for the footwear to be stuck between the pedals and the pilot’s ability to quickly escape a sinking floatplane. A design environment needs justification for design, and there are no requirements for everyone to wear the same shoes.
In the communication environment practical communication tools are used. In the infant years of airport control towers, clearances were given by light signals. As technology continued to change, radio communications become the standard method. As technology is changing rapidly other means of communication were implemented and are continuing with new technologies. Changes in technology requires training sessions to be familiar with new communication and supervised use until personnel easily can use these tools. One example is the online SiteDocs cloudbased SMS program. It takes information sessions to become familiar, and as it is used, it becomes a second nature.
The equipment environment is a broad definition of what to include. Anything that are equipment or tools are included. There is also an interaction between the equipment environment and other environment. These are not defined lines written in rocks between the different environments, but they are rugged, fluid, and flexible. Rugged and fluid lines may be a distraction to personnel, and it becomes the responsibility of management to conduct regular information sessions about the organization and its operation.
Environmental factors are simple to apply within a safety management system when processes are linked to regulatory requirements.
OffRoadPilots
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