Q.How did you first get involved with the GSE side of aviation?
A.The long story is that I've been with 6 carriers in 30 years - starting in 1973 with Ozark Airlines based in St. Louis. My office was right next door to the man who was in charge of securing and maintaining the ground support equipment. His name was Glen Hale and he became my mentor. He educated me to the reality that GSE plays as big a role as aircraft do. I learned a lot from him and I would record any incidents involving injuries or aircraft damage that involved ground support equipment to do some trending and tracking just to see the involvement between what we call safety and operational excellence, although we didn't use those terms back then. To this day at Delta, through our GSE support group, we use metrics that look at the role at how many injuries and/or damages we have related to ground support equipment, so we keep that metric alive today.
Q.Who do you serve as Corporate Director of Safety?
A.I have policy and oversight for Delta main line, which is our global operation, our new low-fare service Song, DALGlobal Services, Comair and ASA because they're part of the Delta enterprise, the shuttle operation, and our Delta Technology Group, even though it is not related to GSE, it's still related to the employee safety. I have responsibility for any Delta employee in their work environment as well as passenger issues inside the plane. Our total corporate safety staff has 45 people, with 8 at the corporate level who are dedicated to employee safety , health ergonomics and ground safety and the rest within on staff dedicated to flight safety, environmental and emergency response. We work as a team to trend and track risk and drive improvements across the enterprise. I'm an 'in-person' kind of guy and we try for regularly scheduled, face-to-face meetings. If you're not out there, people forget.We do quarterly meetings between the GSE and the Safety departments to get our groups together and talk about issues that impact us.
Q.What resources do you use to help you perform your job?
A. I'm a big believer in partnerships. George Prill and I started the Underwing Partners Safety Leadership Team (UPSLT), a group for anyone that services a Delta account, in 1996. We were the first ones to use the theme of partnerships. We have people who supply services to us, whether it's on the ramp, maintenance of GSE, or the handling of cargo contracts, and we all get together to share best safety practices. We meet four times a year and everyone takes a turn sponsoring the meeting. Our group was recognized by the Flight Safety Foundation as having an impact on ground safety because of the way we work together. We have 10 members and we keep it small so we can accomplish something. Right now, we're rolling this program out to our European partners so that it will truly be a global partnership. We look at goals, we develop a common safety process, for example, "Do you have safety goals established?" I care that they have a process in place that involve metrics. At our fall meeting, we share our safety business plans. It's very successful and I'm very proud of that. Our next meeting is April 2-3 in Amsterdam. It will be a joint meeting between our domestic UPSLT team and what we call our GUPSLT, Global Underwing Partners Safety Leadership Team. It's a small community and we're trying to get the big players together. For example, Menzies - they service us in several domestic operations, but also they service us in our Latin American operations, and in several operations in Europe. So how do I ensure a consistent process? One of the topics for the
meeting: Marshalling plan - examining the work process. When you have more than
one supplier working, how do you coordinate the teams to not get in each other's
way so you can have a safe, on-time departure?
Q.What safety suggestions would you offer to the aviation ground support community?
A.My 6 drivers of safety offer that you have to balance the: 1) Financial
or business piece; 2) Customer Service element; 3) the Regulatory driver (EPA,
FAA,NTSB, DOT, NFPA, OSHA); 4) the Work Process; 5) Innovation/Technology applied
to the business; and 6) Moral Leadership.
Our number one value at Delta is Safety. In safety, everything is fair. There are no competitive secrets in safety.
