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Aviation History
1997
1997 - 1487.PDF
MILITARY SAFETY This Argentine air force Boeing 707 crashed 200m short of the runway a Eziza International Airport, Buenos Aires, Argentina al military flight-safety seminars, but is not free to say why. When once asked to comment on the value of such conferences and explain what can be gained from them, he said that he would have to obtain clearance to speak on the subject, then had to report that he was "unable to accede to [the request] at the present time". Brig Gen Orin Godsey, who has just retired as head of safety for the US Air Force, confirms what Wong could not, saying: "We currently exchange safety information with more than 40 foreign air forces, through memoranda of understanding. These include all the NATO nations, and others including Bangladesh, Thailand and Singapore. The exchange of information furthers all our safety pro grammes." Godsey explains that he is also a member of the civil-based Flight Safety Foundation (FSF), serving on two committees ".. .where we exchange information with man ufacturers and civil airlines". One example Godsey gives of the USAF benefiting from the cross-fertilisation of ideas is the application of lessons learned from the FSF's controlled- flight-into-terrain (CFIT) studies, which led to the development of prevention programmes. Godsey says that the new look at CFIT, plus lessons learned from the Boeing CT-43 crash at Dubrovnik, Croatia, in April 1996 and the Lockheed Martin C-130H Hercules accident in August have led to the USAF's just- announced decision to fit AlliedSignal Aerospace enhanced ground-proximity warn ing systems (EGPWS) in its transports. Godsey had recommended that the USAF should leapfrog ordinary GPWS in favour of the enhanced version wherever installation is planned, and this is now decided. Another key result of the Dubrovnik accident is that the USAF will install global-positioning-system (GPS) satellite navigation in all its aircraft by the mm of the century, to help with situation aware ness and navigation accuracy. THE GROWING FORUM The chairman of the European Air Forces Flight Safety Committee (EAFSC), Air Cdre Rick Peacock-Edwards of the Royal Air Force, points out that, since he took over the chair nearly three years ago, he has seen Austria, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Romania Slovakia, Sweden and Switzerland join to an organisation which formerly was purely NATO-based. Now, he comments, "...it's an expanding organisation. If it gets much bigger, we are going to have to think about where we are going to in the future." Peacock-Edwards says that he has visions of a worldwide umbrella organisation which depends on regional committees to feed it with ideas and information. Recently, the European organisation, which meets every eight months, has started to invite a non-European military safety chief to speak on regional safety issues. Singapore's Col Wong was the latest of the non- European safety chiefs to give such a briefing. The South African air force, which was due to hold its own internal safety congress, decided to make it completely international. It was cross- cultural as well, he reports, in that airlines were represented. Godsey was there to give a presen tation on risk-management, and he reports that he was delighted to find delegates from 17 African countries, and more than 70 countries altogether, at the seminar. "We meet to steal ideas from each other," Godsey says. The EAFSC seminars take a week. The first day and a half, says Peacock-Edwards, are used to review the progress of policies born out of the previous meeting, and to examine all the signif icant accidents which have happened since then. When the groundwork has been completed, each seminar follows an agreed theme. Recent themes have been technology for the year 2000, risk management, and reduced manpower fol lowing political changes. The themes themselves are not allowed to lock out current issues or concerns, Peacock- Edwards emphasises. Human factors is always a high-profile issue, he says, adding that, at the moment, "...obviously risk-management and CRM [crew-resource management] are flavours of the day, and we make sure we cover them, whether wrapped up in the [conference] theme or as separate issues". In addition, whichever air force is the host for a given conference invites the delegates to see something of its operations, training, or flight- safety organisation: "It is not all conducted in the lecture hall," says Peacock-Edwards. At the next meeting, in September 1997, the theme will be flight safety in international exer cises, which have been common events in NATO for many years, but now have extended well beyond the Alliance. Safety is a special con sideration in any multi-national exercises, par ticularly where multi-lingual/multi-cultural co-operation has to play a part. Meanwhile, since 1991, the world has seen multi-national forces operating "for real" in the Gulf and in Bosnia. Forums such as the EAFSC are the only effective places, Peacock-Edwards points out, where the safety lessons learned in such opera tions can be reviewed and then integrated into both policy and training programmes. RISK MANAGEMENT "All nations are thinking about risk manage ment far more," maintains Peacock-Edwards. For example, Singapore has a risk-manage- • FLIGHT INTERNATIONAL 4 -10 June 1997 39
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