used your hands-on knowledge and experience to make systemic changes to prevent it from happening again,” Lawton says. “It’s a much more constructive attempt to fix problems in our industry on a global scale. It allows you to track and share your data. Here at the foundation we have an aggregate server so all participants can look at de-identified data from the other participants. It allows every- body to establish some benchmarks, for one thing, and the more informa- tion we can exchange the more we can improve things. Mike France came to me one day and said, ‘Why couldn’t we do something similar for ground operators, and get people exchang- ing information like this. I think it’s a great idea. Once you start getting people to coalesce around improv- ing ourselves in the industry and get in the middle of the open sharing of information, I think you’ll find, like we have, that there are definite pat- terns to problems that keep recurring. That’s useful information in and of itself: your problems are not unique!” As often as not, Lawton says, the answers present themselves more readily than people might imagine. “When I first started looking at how to help adapt the ASAP model for ground operators, one example jumped out at me about an FBO that had this one guy who was a real whiz at moving airplanes around faster than anybody else,” Lawton says. “He was so fast he became the go-to guy to call on, just in terms of efficiency. Well, he banged an airplane up real good one day and was let go, and afterwards everyone kept trying to figure out how to get back to that level of efficiency for which he’d set the standard. They were developing their SMS and had a whole set of Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), but in reality the SOPs were there for show and nothing more, and that guy certainly wasn’t using them. Nobody was, and he was being indirectly encouraged to keep not using them. If he had been using them, he wouldn’t have dinged up that airplane so bad! In the end, he ended up getting re- hired and became directly involved in creating new SOPs that aim for both boosting efficiency and risk manage- ment. That’s the direction we want to be in: a much more formalized process for looking at events that happen, looking at the subsequent corrective actions, and then following through: Did the fix you came up with actually work? Did it fix the problem? Can the lesson be shared? It becomes a much more robust process and it helps you develop a company-wide and industry-wide safety culture. The whole idea is to make it a coopera- tive effort to fix the problems, not to place blame. That’s the mantra we keep repeating time after time after time ‘til we’re blue in the face: all we’re trying to do here is fix all these little things that could lead to much more serious consequences. That’s the goal in any safety program.” “The way we’ve implemented ASAP, there’s a definite process to how these incidents are handled,” Lawton says. “You fill out a report, that report is then de-identified and reviewed by an event review commit- tee—in our case it’s comprised of a company representative, an employee representative, and an FAA represen- tative—and the whole thrust is to get to the crux of an event and then work together proactively to come up with corrective action. What happens as a result, if the program’s done properly, is you start seeing how to do things on a global scale, how to really fix and change things. As the volume of reports keeps growing, that really becomes the advantage, and now you have another tool in your toolkit to advance safety culture, fulfill part of the SMS process, identify and man- age risk better, and also measure the effectiveness of what you’re doing.” France says the NATA Safety Committee is reviewing options and is beginning plans for a Ground Handling Safety Symposium in 2016. “Our aim at this point in the process is not to promote a single solution, but to start the conversation,” France says. “A ground handling safety symposium is great first step towards building a lasting program that posi- tively impacts aircraft handling.” TO FIX THE PROBLEMS, NOT TO PLACE BLAME. Aviation Business Journal | 4th Quarter 2015 17
