IATA SAFETY REPORT 2009

The IATA Annual Safety Report for 2009, based on worldwide accident and incident data, offered some enlightening statistics as always. Firstly, runway excursion was the most frequent accident type in 2009 and it is no coincidence that IATA is revisiting its runway excursion risk reduction toolkit - I am fortunate to be contributing to that effort and will have more on the subject later. Even more striking for me was the finding that almost a quarter of accidents were attributed in part to deficient safety management, and that 86% of those implicated the regulator for deficient safety oversight. For a start I would refer to my earlier piece on the EC List of Banned Carriers, and suggest that the EC might have a point! Secondly, what does this say for the concept of safety management systems (SMS)? The whole idea of SMS is to allow operators an element of autonomy in safety management, free to some extent of prescriptive regulatory constraints, to allow them achieve the best standard in a way that suits their operation. However, if neither the operators NOR the regulators can be trusted to maintain adequate standards of operational and corporate safety, SMS is doomed to fail. We can't let this happen because it has been proven time and again that regulatory compliance does not equal a safe operation...