What Do the Regulations Mean?

The key to success of a SMS:

The purpose of an event investigation process is to manage the risks from events caused by human actions that may affect flight safety, personal injury, and equipment damage. Event investigation programs help to identify contributing factors to errors and violations and to create corrective actions to prevent future events. Examples include hard-to-understand procedures, time pressure, distractions, fatigue, poor communication, and a variety of additional workplace and life conditions.

A well-thought-out and reasonable consistently applied company disciplinary policy is required to handle errors and violations. An error is a human action that unintentionally deviates from the required, intended, and expected action. A violation is a human action that intentionally deviates from company or regulatory policies or procedures.

The operator’s manual for human factors in aviation maintenance (www.hf.faa.gov/opsmanual) outlines three benefits to human factors training:

1. It is instrumental in fostering a positive safety culture.
2. Human factors training for the work force, including for the leadership, is a critical and cost-effective first step in identifying methods to recognize, understand, and manage human performance issues.
3. Effective human factors training not only improves work performance, but also promotes work force physical and psychological health.

As leaders and technicians in sour industry we need to be proactive in 2006 and establish a successful training program for all to ensure we maintain our competitiveness in this dynamic aviation industry. We now have our guidelines, adopt them and give employees the training they need to excel. This not only makes good regulatory sense but good business sense.