Fatigue Risk Management tools that make a difference.
The two volumes of ICAO FRM guidance material are quite comprehensive documents of some 150 pages each. Some safety professionals find it difficult to fully embrace the concept of FRMS after reading them. For this reason we at Jeppesen have produced a one-page concise simplification you might find useful. Please find it through this link. Enjoy!
Fatigue Risk Management tools that make a difference.
A few years ago, Finnair became the first airline to plan their pilots with direct influence by a mathematical fatigue model during crew schedule construction. In recent months the airline has expanded its usage to also include fatigue “alerts” that are automatically pushed to the planners in day of operation.
Finnair is using the alert monitor, a feature of Jeppesen Crew Tracking. The alert monitor re-evaluates the entire operation every few seconds and flag potential crew problems to the planner such as late check-ins, too short connection times, breach of maximum duty time etc.
The alert monitor has been in use at Finnair for several years, but it has until now only been used to resolve issues around operational feasibility and regulatory compliance. Now, supporting a performance-based approach, the human physiology is taken into account through the use of the Boeing Alertness Model – allowing for a more precise address of flight safety.
Jari Ahonen, Crew Tracking Specialist, Finnair, showing fatigue alerts in the system
“The alert monitor is our main tool for not missing out taking action where needed,” says Jari Ahonen at Finnair. “Fatigue alerts are now present as a new category in the monitor enabling us to put extra attention to problematic scheduling patterns – going beyond what regulation requires. Also during problem resolution, when recombining flights for our crew, we have fatigue indicators available in our planning GUI and can take that into account.”
Source:
Bryan Burns
President
888-723-3135
bburns@acsf.aero
GAMA CHARTERS MAKES ACSF INDUSTRY AUDIT STANDARD REGISTRY
Alexandria, VA, February 11, 2014 — The Air Charter Safety Foundation (ACSF) is pleased to announce that Gama Charters, Inc., Stratford, CT has joined the ACSF as a member and has been added to the ACSF Industry Audit Standard (IAS) Registry.
“By successfully completing the IAS, Gama Charters has demonstrated their commitment to high standards,” said ACSF president Bryan Burns. “We congratulate them on their dedication.”
“We would strongly recommend the adoption of this standard to any organization looking toward continual improvement and the ability to ensure scalability for future growth,” said Gama Charters’ director of operations Tom Miller.
The IAS is the first and only extensive audit program specifically created for on-demand operators by a committee of Part 135 and 91K industry leaders. It is conducted every 24 months and is in-depth in its evaluation of regulatory compliance and the operator’s SMS program against both FAA and international standards.
Customers should look for the ACSF IAS registered logo and encourage their preferred charter provider to participate in the program. The ACSF makes its operator registry and key company details available at no charge, so verification of IAS registration is quick and easy. Charter consumers can view the registry at www.acsf.aero/registry.
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“The vision of the ACSF is to enable on-demand charter providers and fractional program managers to achieve the highest levels of safety in the aviation industry. This goal will be achieved through:
SMS Lift is a training solution to address the largest challenge in safety management system implementation that faces flight departments today: employee engagement. This course, designed to be self-facilitated and conducted at your pace, contains all the components for a small to medium flight department to capitalize on all the time and effort spent establishing an SMS. This easy to understand and facilitate course will demonstrate to your entire staff their important roles and responsibilities within this system. It is not an explanation of an SMS program, but rather a demonstration of the complexity of the system and the critical roles each employee plays within the SMS.
Let Convergent Performance elevate your existing SMS to new heights with the aviation industry’s #1 training courseware solution: SMS Lift. This boxed collection includes:
Order from our online store! The SMS Lift boxed collection includes enough class materials for 10 participants. Additional participant materials are available for purchase for larger class sizes. For large flight departments, bulk orders can be arranged. Contact us for details. For more information: SMS Lift Flyer For an introduction to the program (on YouTube): long version
TechPubs Global, Longmont, CO January 22nd, 2014; TechPubs Global is pleased to announce its newest client, WestJet. WestJet is one of five of the Top Ten North American airlines to select TechPubs’ TechSuite solution for their comprehensive technical publications and compliance management requirements in the past eight months.
With this award, TechPubs Global‘s TechSuite solution has become the preferred airline content management solution in Canada. Version 4.4 of the TechSuite solution has been released, and will be implemented at WestJet over the next few months.
Click here to find more information on how TechSuite version 4.4 can help airlines, like WestJet, efficiently manage their manuals and regulatory compliance.
Source RotorCraftPro jhadmin posted on January 09, 2014 09:08
IHST Knows Why Helicopter Accidents are Happening; It’s Now Trying to Stop Them
Author: James Careless
In its quest to bring the global helicopter accident rate to zero, the International Helicopter Safety Team (IHST) has analyzed more than 1,000 U.S. civil helicopter accidents and their causes. Having done so, the IHST’s investigators have come to two clear conclusions: (1) Helicopter accidents are ultimately caused by incorrect human decisions, and (2) the evidence shows that reducing the accident rate to zero is actually possible.
“After going through the NTSB investigations in detail, one thing has become obvious: No one has invented a new way to crash a helicopter,” says Matt Zuccaro, IHST co-chair and president of Helicopter Association International. “The reasons helicopters crashed ten years ago remain the same today, and all of their causes can be traced back to the people who flew, serviced, or managed the helicopters.”
The Main Culprit
Based on U.S. data from the calendar years, 2000, 2001, and 2006, the majority of helicopter accidents occur in the Personal/Private (18.5%) and Instructional (17.6%) categories, followed by Aerial Applications (10.3%) and EMS (7.6%). The full breakdown is available online at www.ihst.org.
Despite the difference in flight applications, the main factor leading to both fatal and nonfatal accidents remains constant across all categories. “The analysis of the accidents revealed that a majority of them had a standard problem with pilot judgment and action,” said Fred Brisbois, co-chair of the IHST’s U.S. Safety Implementation Team and Sikorsky Aircraft’s former director of aviation & product safety. He continued, “The initiating event in the accident sequence was the absence of adequate preparation or planning by the pilot, or in some cases incorrect judgment in reaction to the situation or event.”
‘Absence of adequate preparation’ covers many elements. It includes not checking what the weather is going to be like along the entire flight path, as opposed to just the departure and arrival locations. “A common issue is VFR-trained pilots finding themselves flying in IFR conditions, for which they are not trained,” said Bob Sheffield, an IHST Executive Committee member and AgustaWestland’s Senior Advisor on Safety and Fleet Operational Improvements. “Had they properly looked at the weather forecast before they flew, they could have avoided this situation and stayed safe.”
In such circumstances, under-prepared pilots can save themselves, their passengers, and their aircraft by just landing at the soonest, safest available location. “It’s such an easy solution to the problem,” Zuccaro said. “It’s better to wait on the ground until you can fly safely again, than to push the odds and risk disaster.”
Adequate preparation goes further than just proper pilot training and pre-flight briefings. It also covers everything from an aircraft’s flying abilities and respecting its limits to having sufficient fuel onboard, and keeping the aircraft properly maintained in line with manufacturers’ specifications and product updates.
Meanwhile, when it comes to training, adequate preparation translates to using available simulators to increase student pilot knowledge before going airborne, and not running avoidable risks when in an aircraft. “Some helicopter instructors have been taking student pilots to 700′ and then having the students try to auto-rotate to landing, which is dangerous and unnecessary,” said Sheffield. “We recommend starting rotation training from at least 1,500′ AGL and resuming engine power no lower than 500′ AGL to minimize the risk until the student gains some proficiency.”
The Management Gap
The IHST has identified other human-controlled factors that contribute to helicopter accidents. They include not having a Safety Management System (SMS) in place, and not installing and/or paying attention to Health & Usage Monitoring Systems (HUMS) and Flight Data Monitoring (FDM).
“It’s the small operators who don’t have an SMS in place, because they see it as too onerous a job to create,” Bob Sheffield said. “I usually can change their minds, after I get them talking about a particular issue that they faced that was safety-related – say a flight that went wrong due to bad weather – and what they did after the fact to prevent the incident from happening again. Because this is what an SMS really
is: a compendium of lessons learned about safe flying and potential dangers, which are systematically organized and laid out for everyone to see and use.”
HUMS can also make a difference, but only if they are both installed and given attention. “The UK Civil Aviation Authority did an analysis of how HUMS was working for Bristow Helicopters in the North Sea,” Sheffield noted. “They found that up to 67% of incident equipment failures could be predicted accurately, based on the HUMS data before such failures actually took place.”
Regarding FDM, IHST has found that data compiled during flight operations is extremely useful not just to researching issues that occur, but also for prevention. “Before I came to AgustaWestland, I was Managing Director for Shell Aircraft, which flies more than one million passengers a year to its oil and gas properties,” said Sheffield. “Using Flight Data Monitoring information, we were able to show pilots what kinds of maneuvers went outside our operating envelopes. The result was that we went from an average of 1.3 exceedances on every flight to 0.13 per flight in just four years; a tenfold drop.”
The Need for Cultural Change
IHST’s research revealed two serious cultural issues that can lead to accidents occurring.
The first cultural issue is shortcuts. “Many smaller operators are pushed on their costs, and so they sometimes cut corners on required maintenance, pilot training, and other management functions to try to keep cost down,” said Matt Zuccaro. “The problem is that taking shortcuts always comes back to haunt you, sooner or later, simply because the ability of the aircraft and/or pilot to cope with normal flying changes has been compromised.”
The second cultural issue is the “mission first” attitude for which helicopter pilots are renowned. “Imagine that the flying conditions are unsafe for a VFR-only pilot, and then ask him to fly to pick up a package; chances are he won’t,” Zuccaro said. “Now change the scenario. Tell him that the pickup is for a critically injured infant at an accident scene. Chances are he will make the flight, because a life-saving mission comes first – even if the pilot is not capable of flying safely in such conditions.”
For the helicopter industry to get its accident rate down to zero – and get as close as it can to this point as a matter of practice – both cultural elements must change. “We must get operators big and small to understand that corner-cutting is too risky to do, and that the ‘mission first’ attitude, although admirable, is also too dangerous to continue,” said Zuccaro. “In both cases, we must switch to a ‘safety first’
culture, because only by putting safety first can we truly bring accident rates down and keep them down.”
The IHST’s Response
Having compiled all this information about helicopter accidents, the IHST is doing whatever it can to communicate its findings and solutions to helicopter operators, owners, and pilots. This includes a tremendous amount of free information on www.ihst.org, plus ongoing training sessions being held around the world. The safety group is also working “with our international partners to share common lessons learned to develop effective safety tools,” Brisbois said. “We will be holding an International Safety Symposium next year, immediately after Heli-Expo 2014, to foster the exchange of information and ideas to continue our resolve to reducing the accident rate.”
As for IHST’s goal of reducing helicopter accidents by 80% by the year 2016? “We have changed this goal, to aim for the zero accident goal on an ongoing basis,” Matt Zuccaro replied. “The problem with the 80% goal is that – although accident rates have indeed fallen since IHST was formed – there is an absence of reliable global information on helicopter hours and usage. As well, the 80% reduction implies that the remaining 20% of accidents are acceptable, which of course they are not.”
In all its efforts, the IHST will continue to hammer home the concept that helicopter accidents are indeed avoidable, through a combination of proper preparation and training, flight planning, onboard systems and flight monitoring, and compliance with regular maintenance schedules and manufacturer advisories.
“Every accident is preventable,” concluded Brisbois, who has 42 years’ experience in aircraft safety. “Design standards and system safety engineering throughout the industry have had a remarkable and positive impact on improving the design and airworthiness of helicopters. The human factors aspect remains to be the biggest problem: Simply put, it’s poor planning before going to the aircraft that sets the stage for poor aeronautical decision-making in the cockpit.
By Danielle Kelly
For the first time in 30 years, ICAO are set to release a new Annex – Annex 19 – that pulls together current safety management practices and future expectations for facilitating safety risks that exist in our lands and skies.
The Annex looks to promote and enhance the alignment between the state and service providers and operators, which in my opinion should be welcomed and can only be a positive thing. Sharing and learning from each other is good, it’s what we are taught as kids and is something we would do well to remember as adults. ICAO have provided us with Annex after Annex of standards and regulations depicting how things should be done in the industry, with lots of references to safety for operation of aircraft, air traffic services, aerodromes, and airworthiness. This new Annex brings together all of these different provisions to further embed safety oversight and systemic risk sharing, but shouldn’t we be doing this already anyway?
There is a lot of emphasis on the management of safety risks, focusing on what we don’t want to happen, and on the sharing of information. However, how worthwhile the sharing of information actually is depends on what is done with it. ICAO appear to be providing an answer to bridging the gap between simply being aware of other industry incidents and proactively managing and implementing further mitigation strategies to prevent the same thing from occurring on our own watch. But why has it taken a new Annex to be published for us to do this, shouldn’t this be something we should be doing as part of working practice? How do organizations learn and share?
It seems ICAO have produced this Annex to show that it is no longer acceptable just to Prevent, Detect and Respond; we need to be able to learn and share information, particularly as the demand for air travel increases. To that end, ICAO has offered greater support for the next generation of safety management systems. The co-ordination effort being established between State Safety Programs (SSP) and the SMS provides an opportunity to improve the performance of the existing SMS to meet state safety policies and objectives, state safety risk management, assurance and promotion.
Like I said before, we can no longer be seen just to be preventing, detecting and responding to occurrences. Learning isn’t just about reporting, understanding, implementing and then backtracking; it’s much more than that – learning is the sharing of knowledge and information, so let’s get more information about our controls instead of the outcomes. How about we manage the precursor and build our resilience?
Now, it’s all very well saying this but how do we actually achieve it?
Well, we need to start somewhere…so how about our controls? Do we have confidence in our controls? If not, why not? And what do we do about it to make sure we are confident in the controls in place?
Yes, States play a role to establish and prescribe a State Safety Program in order for us to achieve an acceptable level of safety. However, it is up to the service providers and operators who fundamentally need to demonstrate and actively manage risk and the effectiveness of mitigation strategies through their own Safety Management Systems.
So, where do we go with Annex 19?
Well, we have to make time to look at what we’ve got; we know an SMS will give us the means to do everything we need to do and to be able do them effectively in terms of manage hazards and associated risks, log incidents and occurrences to be able to report on performance. There will no doubt be policies and procedures with associated workflows that are required to be followed to ensure the investigation is appropriately dealt with.
With Annex 19, we need more than this. We need a platform to not only do all the things we need to do, but also all the things we want to do; such as anticipating and predicting, strengthening our position and giving us confidence in our controls. Because if we’re not doing that…well…in the eyes of Annex 19…are we doing it wrong?
The Sextant Readings presentation – 8 Steps to an Efficient SMS – has been viewed over 1750 times on SlideShare.
Positioning the “8 steps to an efficient SMS” is intended to clarify some of the mis-information about Safety Management that is rife on the internet. There is a lot of hype about SMS – usually focused on the particular strengths of a vendor’s offering.
However we view Safety Management in the context that safety is a direct result of “A management system based on professionalism and safety principles” of an organization. There are many ‘pieces’ of management system support in the offerings from so-called Safety Professionals.
At Sextant Readings we believe that supporting the management of an organization based on the principles of professionalism and safety is our business. You can see the presentation here:
Our IS-BAO Audit team consisting of Sextant Readings Solutions registered auditors and those of our business partner Mentair Group. Mentair Group has been actively involved with IS-BAO since its inception, and has a great deal of experience in Stage I, II, and III recurring audits. Together with Sextant Readings Solutions experienced auditor team, we offer you experience, knowledge and guidance that are commensurate with your new or mature SMS environment.
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