Measuring Safety In Aviation – Developing Metrics For Safety Management Systems
ProjectThe project Measuring safety in Aviation has been executed by the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences with a wide range of partners, including authorities, universities and companies.
Currently, the relation between safety management activities carried out by aviation organizations and their achievements in safety performance is anecdotal; companies do not actually know what effect their safety management has on their safety outcomes. This makes it impossible for them to define and assess safety risks that exist under their current safety management approach.
Safety Management Systems
In order to improve safety in aviation, new international regulations and guidelines for the management of safety have been introduced to the industry: the so-called Safety Management Systems (SMS). The aim of SMS is to shift safety management to a concept that, next to compliance to safety regulations, also provides evidence of a link between their safety management activities and performance.
Prediciting safety performance
If companies know the effect their safety management has on safety outcomes, they have insight in what the risks are and to what extent these exist. By being able to 'predict' their safety performance, organizations can adjust their safety management to these predictions before incidents occur, resulting thus, in improved safety performance. Moreover, companies will be able to claim to the authorities that their SMS processes are effective.
Research framework
It is commonly assumed that the 'effective' management of safety is correlated with safety performance; however this has not yet been scientifically validated. This study aimed to validate the relation between the effective management of safety according to the systemic models, and safety performance defined as 'the ability to succeed under varying conditions'. Such validation allows companies that do not have the benefit of enough direct safety data, representing their safety performance through their safety management performance.
Five projects
In the research framework, five alternative projects have been identified. All of these projects have been tested separately for their suitability as safety performance indicators. These projects are:
- The gap between Work-as-Done and Work-as-Imagined as an indicator for safety
- Safety culture prerequisites
- Effectiveness of risk control measures
- Planned resources versus Available resources
- The measurement of complexity in a system
- Evaluation of Safety Management System (SMS) with the System Theoretic Process Analysis (STPA) technique
Project scope
The scope of the project was to:
- Assess the suitability of existing safety performance indicators;
- Develop alternative process and safety outcome metrics
- Validate the alternative indicators in practice with help of the industry
- Translate this knowledge into a tool for the industry to evaluate safety in a more objective way than is currently possible.
Partners
The partners who contributed to the project are: Netherlands Aerospace Group (NAG), JetSupport BV, Nationaal Lucht- en Ruimtevaartlaboratorium (NLR), Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij NV (KLM), Ministerie voor Infrastructuur en Milieu, Sky Service Netherlands BV, SAMCO Aircraft Maintenance BV, Koninklijke Nederlandse Vereniging voor Luchtvaart (KNVvL), HeliCentre BV, Transavia, Luchtverkeersleiding Nederland (LVNL), KLM Cityhopper, Team HF PartG, Griffith University – Safety Science Innovation Lab, Delft University of Technology – Safety & Security Science Group, Militaire Luchtvaart Autoriteit (MLA), STg. Human Factors in Aviation Group (HUFAG).
Human Factors and Safety research line
This project is part of Human Factors and Safety research line. As aviation complexity increases, safety becomes even more important. AUAS's Human Factors and Safety research ‘improves the invisible’ as we strive to maintain or even improve safety in our increasingly busy aviation sector.
