Creating a Safety Culture: The Airline Industry

This article was developed and submitted by DuPont, a World Safety Declaration charter signer.

Historically, airlines and airports have devoted significant resources to passenger safety, particularly in the areas of providing airworthy equipment and pilot and maintenance training. In the last several years, stringent security compliance has been added to these efforts to protect the traveling public.

Ironically, the commercial aviation industry has yet to fully embrace workplace safety as a competitive strategy. Unfortunately, there is much to improve. The carriers in North America are a useful example. The 2003 United States Bureau of Labor Statistics data showed about 12 out of every 100 US airline employees were injured on the job. Almost 9 of them were injured seriously enough to miss work for some period of time, requiring either recuperation away from work, restricted duties at work or both. In terms of the widely used metric per 1,000,000 hours worked per year, the rate for total recordable injuries is 58.5, of which 43 are lost workday cases.

These numbers are significantly higher even for hazardous industries such as wood products, construction and mining. The all-industry lost workday rate was just 2.6 workers per 100 (13 per 1 million hours), well below the airlines’ rate. From the DuPont client experience, there is clear evidence regarding which work environments are more or less at risk to employees. The various work groups on the ramp tend to have the highest rate of injuries, followed by the onboard services (cabin staff) employees. Those in more stable work environments, including the cockpit, report fewer injuries.

Airline Workplace Safety: An Important Opportunity
Now more than ever, safety is critical to financial performance in the aerospace industry. The potential exists to dramatically improve the safety performance of the global airline workforce by instilling an enhanced total airline safety culture. This can also directly improve a company’s business culture as well. Developing engaged and accountable leadership through the organization, a strong “central” safety process with deep and broad participation, and robust communications, training and behavioral tools will yield many benefits. These include a drop in workforce injuries, incidents and costs, as well as aircraft and equipment damage. Additionally, employee teamwork, morale and productivity will increase along with service quality and operational efficiency.

A strong operating discipline is based on interdependence, the collective body of an organization coming together as a team to achieve success. This is particularly important in making a step change in the company’s safety culture. Crew resource management (CRM) in the cockpit is a good example of building interdependence into flight safety. CRM, enriched by the concept of threat and error management, can be a useful operating discipline to explore avenues to reduce injuries among the entire workforce.

Two airlines that are working with World Safety Declaration Charter Signer — DuPont — have seen important changes in their safety culture through instilling a strong operating discipline. They are American Eagle and Qantas.

American Eagle
American Eagle, the largest regional airline system in the world, gained a competitive advantage through an effective safety management system that helped reduce total recordable injuries by 40% in a two-year period. Additionally, American Eagle gained the benefits of a strong operating discipline, which goes well beyond the employee injury numbers — reducing lost workdays and aircraft ground damage and improving on-time performance.

A major component of the airline’s safety management system is the executive steering team, co-chaired by the COO and vice president of customer service. It reviews system-wide injury performance progress, assuring resources and programs are in place to accomplish the employee safety culture change.

The American Eagle hubs are its key safety management system focal points. The hubs are where most of the employee activity takes place and where most injuries occur. The line organization at each hub leads the safety management system, promoting interaction and teamwork at leadership levels between ramp, customer service, flight, in-flight and maintenance line managers. The hub central safety committee reviews progress and refines direction. All management levels are involved in setting high safety standards and challenging goals.

The hub central safety committee reviews progress and refines direction. All management levels are involved in setting high safety standards and challenging goals. Subcommittees lead in key areas such as incident investigations and rules/procedures. Each hub has established a disciplined process to focus on the common goal — reducing employee injuries.

Functional injury prevention councils focus on their injury performance and special employee safety issues. One example of such issues was difficult-to-open aircraft doors. The flight attendant injury prevention council successfully tackled this issue.

An analysis of flight attendant reports showed doors on a specific aircraft type were associated with recurring flight attendant injuries. Further data collection and analysis showed that some, but not all, aircraft of this type had difficult-to-open/close doors. Flight attendants logged the door status after each flight using the aircraft tail number to build a database. Door-associated injuries have been reduced as the identified problems are worked on by maintenance (alignment and lubrication), and the door opening/closing procedure (employee hand, foot and weight placement) has been modified based on ergonomic recommendations.

Qantas
Qantas is one of the global commercial air transportation industry’s most respected airlines. It was recognized by Air Transport World in 2004 as “Airline of the Year.” It serves 30 million passengers at over 140 global destinations per year. 

Concerned with its internal “below the wing” industrial workforce safety performance, the Qantas senior management developed a multi-year people safety program that would blend in with its ongoing safety management system. High risk, high cost operations were made the targets.  These included ramp operations, cabin staff, passenger handling, catering, engineering and freight. Qantas contractors were subsequently included. Aided by senior and line management training and mentoring, and coupled with more active involvement by line managers in the activities of their workforce, injury rates began to drop.

In the first year alone, with the active involvement of committed line managers supported by strong safety professionals, total injuries were cut in half.  Heavy maintenance injuries dropped 70%, while all its key performance measure trended up. In one Qantas unit, with sustained injury prevention and case management “back to work” measures, it freed up the equivalent of 50 full time workers available for work, avoiding expensive additional hiring.  As a corollary benefit, the Engineering Processes’ use of toxic chemicals dropped by over 65%, with a goal established to reach 90%. 

Qantas has now reduced its lost time injury frequency rate by over 70%, achieving a 50% drop in lost workdays. Qantas projects it will save $500 million in associated non-value-adding costs, and it will realize a 500% return on the investment it is making in safety initiative. 

Qantas is continuing to drive this reform to ensure employee injuries do not slip back. Aggressive targets have been set for the current and coming years in all measures, and contractors will now be included in injury management and records. In addition, DuPont and Qantas are undertaking a Six Sigma study to improve injury-reporting processes.

Conclusion
 With engaged, accountable leadership through the organization, a strong “central” safety process with deep and broad participation, and robust communications, training, and behavioral audit tools:

• Workforce injuries, incidents, and costs will drop;
• Aircraft and equipment damage, along with their costs, will go down;
• Employee teamwork, moral, and productivity will go up;
• The company’s service quality and operational efficiency will rise; and…
• The business’ cost and schedule risk will drop and become more manageable.

With safety cultures built on a “critical-to-business-success” interdependent operating discipline, fewer aviation industry workers will die from work-related injuries; many more will avoid disabling injuries and lose time from work; and an even greater number will avoid any on-the-job injuries at all.

> Safety Culture
Creating a Safety Culture: The Airline Industry. Historically, airlines and airports have devoted significant resources to passenger safety, particularly in the areas of providing airworthy equipment and pilot and maintenance training. Ironically, the commercial aviation industry has yet to fully embrace workplace safety as a competitive strategy…more