Fighting for safety

There's an interesting tension at each year's International Aviation Safety Seminar (IASS) nowadays, and this years' session - in Moscow - was no exception.

The IASS, originally a modest affair run by the Flight Safety Foundation (FSF) for its member airlines, manufacturers and organisations was, more than a decade ago, merged with the annual safety assemblies of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), and the International Federation of Airworthiness (IFA). As a result it has become a much larger event, and more of an eclectic one, with a consequent exponential increase in the amount of influence it exerts on the individuals who condition the airline world's safety culture. Since these organisations pooled their safety thoughts there has been less of the feeling that the speakers are preaching to the converted. The delegates' disciplines and points of view are now are sufficiently numerous and widely distributed that they are bound to influence fundamentally what happens in the real world of airline operations.

At the FSF/IATA/IFA IASS there is plenty of potential for rivalry. This could be productive or destructive, so which is it?

Here is an over-simplification of the situation: the IASS organisers divide into two camps: the safety purists and the practitioners. The FSF is purist and mainly operations-orientated, even though its membership comes from all sectors of the industry. The IFA is in the purist camp too: true engineers always are - being at one remove from the life-and-death world of operations.

Then there is IATA. It is not really purist, but has the down-to-earth advantage of being usefully practical and being able to call on a huge spectrum of expertise. IATA knows that safety not merely an end in itself, it is also good business.

But during the gestation of that first-class safety-promoting tool, the IATA Operational Safety Audit (IOSA), IATA briefly lost sight of the difference between the achievement of high safety standards being good business for its member airlines, and safety consultancy being a moneyspinner for IATA. That episode appears to be in the past, but at the time it began to look as if IATA though it did not need the FSF or IFA any more.

A risk remains, however, that IATA could come to believe that its safety services are all that's needed. They are, indeed, a vital part of the total equation, but the purists will always be essential to provide independence of thought, some academic rigour and a dedication to principles that could never be corrupted by the purely practical. The latter is essential for the total system's credibility, which would suffer if IATA - however high its standards and pure its intentions - were to become judge and jury for its membership. Long may this healthy tension exist between the various parties as they fight together to improve aviation safety.