Lessons from NATA’s Inaugural Ground Handling Safety Symposium Continued from page 45 aspect of the business, from the CEO and management team to the ground handling team to the person who sweeps the floors,” said John Enticknap, the founding principal of Aviation Business Strategies Group. Enticknap, an accredited IS-BAH auditor with 40 years of experi- ence in the aviation fueling and FBO services industry, facilitated The Savvy Approach to Building a Successful Internal Safety Culture session, focused on building a foun- dation for and reporting on SMS. “You can go and take an IS-BAH fundamentals course, but that doesn’t hand you a usable SMS plan or set of Standard Operational Procedures (SOPs) because those are things that really need to be customized,” Enticknap said. “You can do that customization entirely in-house, but a lot of companies are finding it’s worth bringing in some experts. One of the things my company does is to help FBOs of all sizes develop IS-BAH-compliant programs.” IS-BAH was developed through a partnership between NATA and the International Business Aviation Council (IBAC) to establish a set of global industry best practices for business aviation ground handlers, following the format and struc- ture of the International Standard for Business Aircraft Operations (IS-BAO). Five years after its initial implementation, IS-BAH registra- tion is increasing among NATA members and there appears to be an industry-wide thirst for more structured sharing of safety data. “This is the first time NATA held the Safety Symposium, and one of the key takeaways, for me, was 46 everybody was enthusiastic, every- body was serious about wanting to continually build a strong safety culture, and they all wanted more of this kind of information,” Enticknap said. “NATA was very pleased with the turnout and feedback from the attendees, and, I’ve already been told, the Safety Symposium will be back next year. The emphasis in the attendees’ feedback was on receiv- ing more detailed information on the IS-BAH program because there really are still a lot of questions out there.” Enticknap was effusive in his praise of the other speakers and sessions during the event, par- ticularly Benjamin J. Goodheart’s Smarter Ground Handling ses- sion on safety data collection and analysis; and, says he was impressed by the quality of the conversation around every topic presented. Goodheart, a co-founder of Versant, believes the success of the NATA symposium reflects an indus- try-wide maturation when it comes to big-picture safety management. “If we had said, even just a few years ago, that we were going to get everybody together to talk about the nuts and bolts of Safety Management Systems and this kind of really formalized safety training—talk about the ways that we get people engaged to create learning organi- zations and all of these things that contribute to making FBOs safer and stronger and better—it very well might have been just me and you in the room staring across at each other,” Goodheart joked. “To have this symposium as well attended as it was in its first year, and to have representation from all over the industry, speaks volumes about how much the industry—including FBOs, MROs and other service providers— has matured in the last couple years. Now, all these competing interests have really started to rally around the idea of sharing information, and sharing real data in meaningful ways, in the interest of improving safety records across the industry.” Aviation Business Journal | 4th Quarter 2017
