A Good Safety Program

Safety! Safety! Safety!

The purpose of a safety program is intended to help prevent accidents, illnesses and injuries; increase safety awareness in the work place. Also it ensures the company meets the requirements of environmental protection agency, occupational health, and safety laws and regulations. A good safety program will help reduce the company’s liability and establish safety responsibilities for managers and employees. There are many elements that compose a good safety program; we will explore three.

The first one is Training. Training is the key to just about every program. Supervisors and workers must know the hazards that are involved the work place. A good safety/training program will cover the hazards in the workplace and ensure everyone is aware of those hazards. For example prior to performing any task, there is some type of flight line orientation a new aviation maintainer has to attend. This type of training deals entails working around aircraft, handling h hazardous chemicals, bio-hazardous agents, radiation, or physical/mechanical hazards that they may be dealing with.

The second element is Management encouragement. This fall under the saying “lead by example.” If the leaders or Management doesn’t place emphasis on safety, chances are the employees will not. A good management or leadership will do what it takes to sell the importance of safety. Also if their employees are working in a safe environment, it reduces the chance of injuries to the employees and therefore the company maintains or increases its production.

Last but not lease is Employee involvement. Employees are most in contact with the potential safety and hazardous will have a vested interest in effective protective program. The Employers should or if possible get input from the employees, because they are the ones that are doing the work. Employee involvement coupled with taking their contributions and ideas seriously increasing job satisfaction, leading to increased employed production.

Each company should strive to maintain a healthy and safe working environment. These are just three elements, when put together; it can formulate a first-rate safety program.

Saftey Manager Is The Heartbeat Of A Safe Environment

SAFETY MANAGER IS KEY TO A SAFE ENVIRONMENT

An Aviation Safety Manager is required to develop the necessary forms and instructions for implementing the airline’s aviation safety program. A good safety program is key to a safe and productive environment. Also the Safety Manager is required to announce any aviation safety-related event. Communication is the key here. By informing the employees of various incidents, and events, it reduces the chances of injury to the workers in the work place. The Safety Manger at times will conduct in-house investigation to fine the root cause of an accident or incident. Training is key too. Providing aviation safety training to new personnel is a must. Most employees initially are not familiar with their work environment. What may be safe at a previous airline, or shop might not be safe at another place. One who works around helicopters may not be familiar with the hazardous areas of a running aircraft, so it’s critical that new individuals get the proper training, prior to performing the task. Another critical task of a Safety manager is to providing timely advice and assistance on aviation safety matters to Administrator or other Manager. Management has to be informing so they can influence the employees the important of safety. If Management is not pushing safety, what do you expect the employees to do? The manager have to advocate safety; this is critical because if the employees are safe and injury free, company do not have to pay compensation wagers while the employee is hurt. Production will stay up and the company continues to profit. A safety manager plays a vital roll in industrial companies. A good safety manager can literally make or break a company.

Safety Practice Around The Aircraft

SAFETY IS KEY AROUND AIRCRAFT

Aircraft maintenance work includes inspection and repair of aircraft structures, coatings, and systems in hangars and on the air field. Good training and work practices ensure aircraft and worker safety. Various incidents and accidents occur each year between aircraft, vehicles and persons on many airports around the world, sometimes resulting in considerate damages to properties, personnel and sometimes even with fatal results. There are safety guidance contains safety guidance for towing and taxiing aircraft, aircraft jacking operations, aircraft cleaning and decontamination, aircraft tire mounting and servicing operations, flight line vehicle operations, and hot refueling. These safety practices and procedures in place to minimize injury to those who work around aircraft for examples:
All maintenance engine operation must be coordinated through the airfield control center. In case there is a incident with the aircraft, the airfield control center could notify the appropriate agencies and direct them to the aircraft parking location.

Personal Protection Equipment is a big part of safety practices and procedures. Individuals working around running aircraft must wear ear plugs, or defenders to protect their hearing. Also to be more visible to the pilots and other maintainers, one must wear a reflector vest or jacket. Furthermore, working around running aircraft one must be familiar with the hazardous areas, such as the engine intakes and exhaust. The aircraft and engine may vary; however in general at a minimum, one must stand 25 feet in front and 5 feet to the side of the intake of a running engine. Otherwise an individual or equipment can and will get ingested in to the engine and cause a lot of damage to the aircraft or engine and or, possibly kill someone. The exhaust is an hazardous place, this is way we are require to stay 200 feet away from a running engine. If not the individual(s) could get burns form the heat of the exhaust or blown over by the velocity of the exhaust.

Prior to performing any maintenance on an aircraft, the aircraft has to be safe to work on, prior to starting maintenance. This is call “Safe for maintenance”. Safe for maintenance is a check list to ensure the aircraft is safe. Safe for maintenance consist of, having a fire extinguisher near the aircraft, making sure the aircraft tires are chalked, the throttle and cock pit switches are in the right. Because if you put power onto an aircraft and it’s not safe, you may inadvertently start the motors; apply electric power to area of the aircraft where personnel are working at. In the case of the military, you may inadvertently launch a missile.

In Progress inspections (IPI): in the Air Force we have what you called the IPI’s. An IPI is an additional inspection or verification step at a critical point in the installation, assembly, or reassembly of a system, subsystem or component. This is one way of minimizing the human factor that is involved in aviation maintenance. Basically one maintainer would perform the work and a more experience maintainer would inspect the work prior to moving on to the next step or completing the task.

Many time maintainers questions safety practices and procedures, sometimes they fail to realize a incident took place and this is why we have safety practices and procedures.

Occupational Safety and Health standards and Environmental Protection Agency

EPA & OSHA WORK HAND AND HAND

EPA and OSHA have the statutory responsibility to ensure the safety and health of the public and America's workforce through the timely and effective implementation of a number of federal laws and implementing regulations. In some areas, the responsibilities of the agencies are separate and distinct. In others, they are complementary. EPA and OSHA wish to work together to maximize the efforts of both agencies to ensure the efficient and effective protection of workers, the public, and the environment.

EPA & OSHA ON THE FLIGHT LINE

Aircraft's fly thousands of miles daily. It takes thousands of maintainers to keep those aircraft in the air. On the ground the maintainers face various health and safety hazards such as being suck down the intake of an aircraft engine, or being blown by the engine's exhaust. Those are just the obvious. When performing maintenance the maintainer have to handle hazardous chemicals such as fuel and oil. This is where EPA and OSHA comes to play. When dealing handling fuel OSHA requires personnel to wear eye protection, gloves and apron. The EPA requires all excess fuel and oil leaks or drains be caught in buckets. To protect the environment we can not allow the excess fuel and oil to leak or drain onto the ground. Another obvious one is hearing protection. When working around running aircraft engines personnel are required to wear ear protection. Over a period of time one starts loosing their hearing. This is why the Air Force annually test its maintainers hearing.

Human Factors in Aviation Maintenanacne

This blog examines the impact of human factors in aviation maintenance. You must have an understanding of what human factors are and how they affect our daily living and work environments, more importantly the aviation maintenance environment. To put it in simple terms; it is about people in the environments in which they work, live and play. It is about the bond forged between the machines, equipment, and procedures about them.

THE UNDER RATED SHELL MODEL

To facilitate the understanding of this under rated science, one must use the SHELL Model when addressing the source of many human errors. Lets begin with a description of the model itself; the S-Software refers to items such as checklist, technical manuals, symbologys and so on. H-Hardware is the items that make up or interact with man, seats, handles, switches, nuts and bolts. E-Enviorment is everything from weather, to work climate and biological rythms. The last part of the model is L-Livewire, which has multiple components. The is the physiological aaspect, heatlh diet, rest, and fatigue, just to name a few. The psychological, emotional make-up, attitude, motivation, and judgement are some examples. Throughout the aviation maintenance world, whether it is in the civilian sector or the miitary, there are many areas of responsibility when it comes to putting aircrat in the air. Many things happen to an aircraft before it ever taxies as far as maintenance is concerned and there is a generous amount of time for anything to happen. Lets examine the Human Factors in the following incident.

UNCONTAINED ENGINE FAILURE

This report explains the accident involving Delta Air Lines flight 1288, an MD-88, which experienced an uncontained engine failure during the initial part of its takeoff roll at Pensacola Regional Airport in Pensacola, Florida, on July 6, 1996. Safety issues in the report include the limitations of the blue etch anodize process, manufacturing defects, standards for the fluorescent penetrant inspection process, the performance of nondestructive testing. Here are a few issues involving maintenance that demonstrate how human error was casual in this accident. The findings of the FAA review included:

1. There is no assurance that the material received by the nondestructive inspection organization for FPI processing was clean enough for an adequate FPI. (H-Hardware)

2. [Engine part] cleaning personnel receive OJT [on-the-job-training], with no formal classroom training. The team noted that sensitivity to the criticality of the engine components and the end purpose for which these components were being cleaned…was not provided as part of the OJT (Software/L-Livewire).

3. Visible trash and debris were…under the transport rollers utilized on the FPI line. Since there are no protective covers over the tanks containing the FPI process materials, similar trash and debris is expected in the FPI material.

4. The transport rings utilized for parts holding during the FPI process became easily contaminated with fluorescent material. One inspector was noted having a difficult time inspecting the inside of a hole because of the high fluorescent background from the transport ring visible through the hole. He tried shielding the ring from view with his glove, but it also was contaminated with fluorescent material. (Hardware/E-Environment)
5. One inspector was noted touching the component to be inspected, and smearing the inspection area, before inspecting it. (L-Livewire).
6. There appears to be no uniform way of handling and indexing components during evaluation in the inspection booth. (S-Software)
Human Factors an on going process

With various view on how to track and resolve the matters of human errors, as they are associated with aircraft maintenance. It will continue to be a grueling process; after-all no one wants to be at blame. As time will unearth Human Factor can be assimilated and dealt with in a scientific manner.

Importance of a Risk Management Program

Risk...Is Really it Worth it?

Back in 2003 a 19 seat Beech 1900, which plunged in to the earth 37 seconds after take off, was found to have improper set turnbuckles, which control tension on the elevator cable. How would you feel if you were the maintainer that performed work on the turnbuckles prior to the plan's accident. You probably would feel pretty bad know you were the cause of the accident. This is way companies have Risk management programs. Risk management insures the a safe product is being produced. The Purpose of a risk management program is to identify potential problems before they occur so that risk handling activities may be planned and invoked as need across the life of the product or protect to mitigate adverse impacts on achieving objectives. Common risks taken in aviation maintenance are Skip a step, skip a task, ignore warnings and cautions, intentional deviations, improper removal and replacements, improper repair, incomplete installations and allow debris to enter.

Procedures To Mitigate Risk of Human Error

Clear documentation; crystal clear understanding and documentation of actions ensures inspections and checklist are correctly usable; however clear documentation is useless if its not used. Proper inventory; accuracy in reporting tool or part inventory is essential. Proper inventory of parts and tool will ensure that an aircraft is airworthy when it takes off. Checklist; checklist are tailored towards individual circumstances. It provides the minimum requirement to safely perform maintenance or operate aircraft engines. Inspections ; purpose of an inspection is to ensure the work being performed is done properly. A second or third set of eyes will ensure that the work was done properly. Functional checks; are performed to ensure an aircraft is airworthy and capable of accomplishing its mission. These are just a few Procedures that can help minimize risk during daily aviation operations.

The Big Picture: By taking a step back and focusing attention to cover the human elements that can lead to incidents, as well as the technological factors the probability of future incidents can reduced and improve an organization’s safety performance, safety culture and communication systems. It is not simply about what happened, changing procedures or trying to control and alter observable behaviors; sometimes we have to look beneath these behaviors to understand why and how they occurred and to provide ways of managing human failure so that companies are not only safer but more adaptive and proactive in their approach to safety.