Positive safety culture

It starts with identifying hazards that can negatively impact flight safety, assessing the risks, and mitigating or even eliminating them. These decisions influenced by safety culture can be anything from putting your phone on do not disturb when you get to the airport, to canceling a flight after a bad night’s sleep, or changing the CFI you fly with if you disapprove of their decision making. These all address risks of varying levels of seriousness, but all can increase your safety. And while you may think only those in leadership positions can change safety culture in your flying community, anyone can lead and influence by example. Even small changes can have a positive ripple effect.

In addition, pilots who demonstrate a readiness to learn from and share their mistakes, learn from others’ mistakes, stay proficient, and use cockpit technology effectively already mitigate risks in many ways to help improve safety. Sharing what you learn and know with others, offering decision-making advice when needed, and committing to continuing education (like attending FAA Wings seminars, which is easy to do virtually now, too) all contribute to a positive safety culture.

Choosing to create a positive safety culture is in some pilots’ nature, rooted in personality traits present outside of aviation. Others have to actively work for it. But if we aren’t careful, we can develop a negative safety culture as well, where mistakes are not talked about, safety concerns are ignored as part of a culture of silence, and authority figures are not trusted to have your best interest at heart—instead perhaps worrying most about money. There may also be concerns about retaliation. In the worst cases, bad decisions can extend into legal issues as well.

This can be hard to break out of and often requires leadership and structural changes to fix. If you haven’t experienced it yourself yet, you’ve heard of these places before—the flight school where the mechanic does the bare minimum maintenance, the pilot who never preflights, the senior CFI who never owns the mistakes they make, the head of a flight department who haughtily dismisses an employee’s maintenance concerns….the list goes on. The best option is to never let it get that bad or start to repair the culture as soon as possible.

You may never be in that position, but even as an individual, it’ll be up to you to stay safe and have your own safety-based attitude toward aviation. It can be inconvenient, but the inconvenience is worth reducing the risk in this unforgiving but rewarding world we get to enjoy. Stay accountable, even if it is only to yourself.

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