White Paper on Safety Culture for AESA Air Operators
Madrid, 5 April 2022 (AESA)
The State Aviation Safety Agency (AESA) publishes the White Paper on Safety Culture for Air Operators in which it presents the Pilot Programme for the Evaluation of Safety Culture, a pioneering activity to improve operational safety.
The implementation of the Culture of Safety in companies in the aviation sector is essential for operational safety, but since it is an intangible concept, it is difficult to establish its effects on safety and the associated risk that does not implement it.
Therefore, the objective of EASA with the preparation of this White Paper has been to provide guidelines to ensure that air operators strengthen the Culture of Safety as a fundamental component in the development of safety within the framework of their operation, through a set of measurement concepts and protocols in the environment of the Safety Management System (SMS), which have to be adapted to the particular characteristics of each organisation.
Safety Culture Pilot Program
In order to facilitate the implementation of the protocols and indicators of the Safety Culture, the Agency presents a Pilot Programme that can be added to any aircraft operators they want, in order to adapt and optimise the measurement tools, to study the actions needed to improve the Culture of Safety within the organisations and to draw lessons learned from the application of this model.
The objective of the programme is to outline the tools proposed in this White Paper and to propose measures to improve the culture of safety in accordance with the experience of air operators wishing to participate in it.
This Pilot Program will allow consensus, through experience, to identify the states of maturity, strengths and weaknesses in the Culture of Safety within an operator, considering the concepts developed and the tools proposed.
The main objective of this Pilot Program will therefore be to adapt and optimise the model and tools proposed to identify the states of maturity of the Culture of Safety in air operators, through the strengths and weaknesses identified.
In addition, the necessary measures to improve the Safety Culture will be analysed where weaknesses are identified, drawing lessons learned from the application of this model in air operators, and incorporating them into a new revised edition of this White Paper.
In this way, the culmination of these activities will be the proposal to the other operators of a system of measuring the Culture of Safety and tools for its promotion, for its effective incorporation into their Safety Management Systems.
Safety Culture Day
In the second half of 2022 AESA will hold a Safety Culture Day for air operators with the aim of presenting the White Paper, and the concepts and elements defined therein. This day will select the organisations that are interested in participating in the Pilot Programme, in order to begin the practical application of the tools proposed in this White Paper on Safety Culture.