In aviation maintenance, as in all other aspects of the aviation sector, safety is paramount. 4 safety management practices that can be applied to make any maintenance operation safer are:
Why do we focus on maintenance in this article? Because maintenance-related accidents are probably the most avoidable of all accidents, and if maintenance is within the domain of your operations then it may be the first place you stress things like:
Other sectors of operations, such as flight operations, may benefit more from things like Human Factors training and emergency response training.
Most successful maintenance organizations have tangible safety metrics that help define their results in terms of safety. For instance, lost-time injury frequency is a metric used to identify potentially unsafe maintenance practices or procedures:
These types of injuries, among many others common to maintenance operators, involve lost time. By analyzing lost-time injury frequency metadata, procedures, and checklists can be put in place to prevent injuries. Some metadata you may analyze to know how to improve safety in maintenance operations are:
Many of us have dealt with situations where communications between management and those performing the work have broken down. In fact, creating positive employee-management relations is something many organizations put much time and effort into cultivating.
Maintaining a relationship that sticks to the rules but has an “open door” feel is tough. Poor communication leads to
In large organizations open communication starts at the ground level through:
The last point is key. You should try hard to promote from within the ranks of your organization. If there are no qualified candidates, encourage top-performing workers to get the qualifications they need to be promoted, such as via paid education programs.
According to James Reason in the paper A Roadmap to Just Culture: Enhancing the Safety Environment, “A safety culture depends critically upon first negotiating where the line should be drawn between unacceptable behavior and blameless unsafe acts”.
In aviation maintenance errors happen all the time. Mechanics break things in the process of trying to fix them and often that happens because of an honest mistake.
You need to distinguish these types of issues from instances of willful misconduct. Fortunately, the frequency of such acts is small compared to the number of honest mistakes that are made in the course of regular maintenance.
You distinguish these acts in your Safety Policy by
The underlying purpose of promoting this information is actually to show that your company is committed to a non-punitive reporting policy. This is because, as said, willful acts are uncommon. Furthermore, because nearly all mistakes will be honest, you want to reinforce the idea that your company accepts that such mistakes will happen and that employees won’t be punished.
In conclusion, safety is a top priority in the aviation sector. From my time in the aviation field and the classroom, the application of these 3 key practices described above would result in positive safety outcomes in the aviation maintenance sector.
Last updated September 2024.