A conceptual evaluation framework for organisational safety culture: An empirical study of Taipei Songshan Airport

This study included three phases. The first phase was to establish an evaluation hierarchy framework for organisational safety culture in accordance with the fuzzy Delphi method (FDM) and including expert perspectives. The second phase involved evaluating weight and rankings in order of importance using a fuzzy analytic hierarchy process. In the third phase, analysis of variance (ANOVA) and the Scheffe multiple comparison test were used to compare the different evaluation constructs and criteria of the airport's various internal safety management units. The study results demonstrated that Taipei Songshan Airport's general management units believed that ‘Safety Supervision’, ‘Safety-oriented Working Environment’ and ‘System of Incentives and Penalties’ should be considered implementation priorities to improve overall performance in the airport organisational safety culture. In addition, the ANOVA results revealed significant differences among the airport's management units with respect not only to the personal dimension, including ‘Safety Values’, ‘Safety Evaluation Standards’ and ‘Safety Management Updates’, but also to the situational dimension, such as ‘Safety Communication and Commitment’ and ‘Injury Rate’.     

Structuring critical success factors of airline safety management system using a hybrid model

With the global trend of legal requirement for a performance-based Safety Management System (SMS), to develop and implement an SMS to deliver services has become the most important goal within the airline industry. Yet there found some discrepancies concerning the use and the manner that SMS was being explained and taught. Therefore, this research aims to develop a quantitative evaluation model, which identifies the key components of airline SMS and considers the interaction between key components. To explore the core value of SMS, an extensive review regarding SMS components are firstly conducted and summarized from major aviation organizations and authorities, and then Grey Relational Analysis is used to group and select key components. After the critical components are derived, Decision Making Trial Evaluation Laboratory and Analytic Network Process are employed to analyze and map out all kinds of interactions among critical components and dimensions systematically. An empirical study is presented to illustrate the application of the proposed methods. From the results of the combined approaches, Organization is the most important dimension in SMS, which begins with Policies that convey to all staff the top managers’ vision on safety.     

A holistic approach to evaluating the effect of safety barriers on the performance of safety reporting systems in aviation organisations

Safety reporting systems are a necessary component of any Safety Management System (SMS) in contemporary aviation organisations. Improving the performance of safety reporting systems can significantly enhance the reliability of safety information and allow the implementation of more effective risk assessment processes. Previous researchers have identified several barriers that influence the effectiveness of safety reporting systems, ranging from individual barriers to organisational issues. However, none of these studies has addressed the concomitant effect of the different barriers as a means of determining the overall effect on the performance of existing reporting systems. This paper proposes a holistic approach to this problem by developing a model that can help to determine the cumulative effect of organisational, working environment and individual barriers on the performance of a safety reporting system in an aviation organisation. The Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) technique was used to examine the relationships amongst the different variables considered in our study. The model was constructed using a broad range of data collected from a survey conducted in a military aviation organisation, with the purpose of identifying the barriers to reporting in this particular context. Results show that the proposed model allows to accurately quantify the impact of the various concomitant barriers in the reporting system, providing a powerful resource to assist stakeholders in the decision-making process that is inherent to the implementation of tailored actions to improve the safety performance of aviation organisations.     

Aviation insurance and the implementation of the small aircraft transportation system

Aviation insurance is a unique field from a business, legal, and regulatory standpoint. Issues such as risk management, contracts, and liability raise particular challenges within this highly specialized market. The implementation of the small aircraft transportation system (SATS), as envisioned by NASA and its industry and academic partners entails a thorough analysis of aviation insurance to determine whether the current market structure could support this major policy initiative. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the current legal, regulatory, and market environments on the implementation and development of SATS. The primary goal is to determine what obstacles these conditions would raise vis-à-vis SATS’ implementation. We also seek to identify strategies, alternatives, and regulatory policies that would help achieve a successful transition to a modern, efficient, and fully developed market for small aircraft transportation services.     

Airline safety measurement using a hybrid model

Although air transport has a good safety record, public perception often focuses excessively on accidents. Safety is affected by many factors such as management, operations, maintenance, environment, aircraft design, and air traffic control. Quantitative measurement of the airline safety index is the goal of this paper. Some previous efforts to measure aviation safety have assumed the criteria to be independent, but this is not the case in the real world. Here a hybrid multiple criteria decision-making model to address dependent relationships among criteria, using a decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory along with an analytical network process, to decide the relative weights of criteria, showing inter-dependence and feedback.     

A review of research on risk and safety modelling in civil aviation

Safety is considered as some of the most important operational characteristics of contemporary civil aviation. An extensive regulatory structure has been established to supplement the private airline, airport and air navigation systems, incentives to limit the risks of flying. This paper reviews the research on risk and safety modelling in civil aviation. In such a context, the basic concepts and definitions of risk, safety and their evaluation are described. The review focuses on four categories of models for safety assessment: causal for aircraft and air traffic control/management operations, collision risk, human factor error and third-party risk.     

An Air Force Logistics Management Index for effective aircraft operation

Air power plays a critical role in modern war. In order to maintain the highest possible level of aircraft readiness, logistics management for aircraft operation must be conducted well. In this study, we use a Structural Equation Model (SEM) to develop an Air Force Logistics Management Index (ALMI) for effective aircraft operation. An individual ALMI rating is estimated for various combinations of characteristics. It is expected that the proposed approach for ascertaining an ALMI will be used as guidance for the development of aircraft logistics management systems of the Republic of Korea Air Force (ROKAF).     

A qualitative study of outsourced aeronautical maintenance: The case of Brazilian organizations

The outsourcing of aeronautical maintenance has been criticized for the quality of services offered. According to the literature, airlines have contracted repair stations to perform maintenance activities on their aircraft or parts when attempting to optimize resources (time, facilities, personnel, money). The attempt to reduce costs in maintenance activities and regulatory deficiencies can lead to maintenance management practices that could threaten equipment airworthiness. Therefore, the aim of this research was to evaluate whether outsourced aeronautical maintenance is aligned to common industrial maintenance management practices. To achieve this goal, qualitative exploratory research was conducted on Brazilian repair stations. For data collection, a questionnaire was developed based on seven factors related to aircraft maintenance. The data revealed that a mismatch exists between the best maintenance management practices and expected repair station performance.     

高速铁路站台雨棚运维管理系统可视化监测E-BIM应用研究

高速铁路站台雨棚结构监测是保证列车行车与旅客候车安全的重要环节。为提高站台雨棚的运维管理与监测效率,针对高速铁路站台雨棚运维管理系统可视化监测进行设计,建立高速铁路站台雨棚运维管理系统可视化监测实施流程。以广州局集团公司海南环岛高速铁路海口东站站台钢结构雨棚为依托,引入基于BIM技术的E-BIM结构进行可视化监测,开发适用于大跨度空站台雨棚运维管理系统的可视化监测模块,实现高速铁路站台雨棚的结构风险管控,确保高速铁路列车与旅客的安全。     

Holistic view of safety culture in aircraft ground handling: Integrating qualitative and quantitative methods with data triangulation

The complexity in aircraft ground handling operations has led this study to conduct a holistic assessment on the ground handling safety culture, with the purpose of preventing accidents at the workplace. This study adopts the multiple perspective assessment model that allows the integration of two mixed methods designed with data triangulation. The qualitative results generated seven themes and eight themes respectively, in which were later generalized and developed for quantitative instrument. The quantitative results showed the industry's safety culture performance and its influence on the safety performance outcome constructs. This study is expected to contribute towards the development of safety culture evaluation for this industry and becomes a stakeholder's indicator to improve safety and health standards.     

SeMS and sensibility: Security management systems and the management of risk in the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority

Following International Air Transportation Association requirement for all member airlines and airports to have a security management system (SeMS) beginning 1 March 2007, many organizations are looking to learn from safety and quality management systems. Without specific guidelines or best practices, organizations are forced to imitate these processes designed for different goals. Since safety, quality, and security environments operate on radically different principles, SeMS implementation must take a different tack. The case of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority illustrates the importance of a custom-designed program that meets public and corporate needs. The Authority is responsible for security screening of passengers, non-passengers, and baggage within selected airports. As a crown corporation with a precise statutory mandate and regulatory environment, the development of a SeMS illustrates some of the key problems for the application of SeMS to larger organizations.     

An overview of current research and developments in urban air mobility – Setting the scene for UAM introduction

Recent technological advances provide the means for potentially realizing urban air mobility (UAM) as a passenger transport mode for intra- and inter-urban transport. However, questions regarding regulations, infrastructure requirements, and economic constraints remain to be answered. Therefore, this review aims at giving an overview on different research areas in the emerging topic of UAM. To this end, findings from several fields within the UAM research community were gathered and are presented here to provide a landscape of relevant questions surrounding the implementation of UAM. This overview considers vehicle-related aspects, such as aircraft requirements and aircraft classification for intra- and inter-city passenger transport, and discusses potential hurdles to their introduction. The exploration of challenges includes questions on certification and policy, as well as challenges in the area of traffic management and ground infrastructure requirements. Besides that, literature on operational concepts, possible market structures and the interaction with existing transport systems will be reviewed. The discussion of hurdles will conclude with a summary of current literature on public acceptance of UAM. An overview of methods for modelling and simulation of UAM will wrap up the prior discussion and provide insights on first modelling results.     

Aircraft line maintenance scheduling and optimisation

With the advent of new technologies and more modern aircraft, many of the maintenance jobs traditionally scheduled for periodic block checks can now be performed in the ‘‘line maintenance” environment, i.e., during layovers between scheduled flights of an aircraft. This flexibility can be exploited to reduce maintenance costs and improve fleet utilisation of an airline. In this paper we introduce and study the Line Maintenance Scheduling Problem (LMSP). The LMSP assigns jobs to available maintenance opportunities, defined by aircraft routes, and sets the starting time for each job. Its objective is to minimise the deviation from this schedule with respect to given due dates for each task, without exceeding resource capacity at the airports at any moment. We formulate the LMSP as a mixed integer programming problem, and describe and compare two solution approaches for this problem: an integrated exact solution algorithm, which solves job assignment and timetabling simultaneously, and a sequential, heuristic approach. We tested our algorithms on a set of instances inspired on data provided by an industry partner. Our experiments show the applicability of both approaches on realistic settings: the exact approach was able to find the optimal solution for all instances, in less than 10 min on average. Our analysis also shows with an example that line maintenance can be more efficient when capacity is spatially spread, even if the total capacity is reduced.     

An innovative method to optimize the maintenance policies in an aircraft: General framework and case study

Maintenance policies applied to aircrafts are governed by a mix of airworthiness authorities’ regulations and choices of suppliers and users. This allows airlines to use different strategies to minimize the total costs of maintenance. In this paper, a new approach that integrates the failure and reparation processes, such as modelling, optimization algorithms, and simulation methods, is proposed to define the best maintenance strategies for complex systems.A case study of an airline carrier is presented. In particular, several critical components for the A320 aircraft family are considered. The impact of the spare parts inventory management is discussed. Different preventive maintenance policies are tested and simulated. With the new policies, the average availability of the aircraft is satisfactory and the total annual cost is reduced to a value of approximately 20% in comparison with the previous policies adopted by the company.     

Licensing and recognition of the aircraft maintenance engineers – A comparative study

The main purpose of licensing is to establish the accountability of a professional in an area. This study focus on the role of licensed engineers involved in aviation. The licensing of aircraft maintenance engineers is a mandatory requirement in the contracting states of the International Civil Aviation Organisation. This paper compares the licensing systems of various countries and looks at differences in the licensing standards that affect their acceptance by another contracting state. It looks at the degree to which non-safety considerations, such as protecting trade and generating additional fees, can affect these decisions. Although most contracting states follow International Civil Aviation Organisation standards for licensing, some dilution in relation to the privileges of aircraft maintenance license has been noticed in the European Aviation Safety Agency system. This paper also looks at the value of category C license in the Agency system.     

Risk analysis of the EASA minimum fuel requirements considering the ACARE-defined safety target

We present the results of flight simulator experiments (60 runs) with randomly selected airline pilots under realistic operational conditions and discuss them in light of current fuel regulations and potential fuel starvation. The experiments were conducted to assess flight crew performance in handling complex technical malfunctions including decision-making in fourth-generation jet aircraft. Our analysis shows that the current fuel requirements of the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) are not sufficient to guarantee the safety target of the Advisory Council for Aviation Research and Innovation in Europe (ACARE), which is less than one accident in 10 million flights. To comply with this safety target, we recommend increasing the Final Reserve Fuel from 30 min to 45 min for jet aircraft. The minimum dispatched fuel upon landing should be at least 1 h.     

Attitudes towards traffic problems and public transport in the Dartmoor and Lake District National Parks

Problems associated with traffic demand have received only scant attention in the rural context and, although accepted as a viable approach to ameliorating urban traffic problems, traffic demand management has only recently been adopted by rural policy makers. In the national parks, where traffic-related problems are particularly acute, most traffic management measures are of the ‘carrot’ varity where attempts are made to persuabe private car passengers to use public transport transpon mobes, their success depends on tne attitudes of private car users towards public transport alternatives and their perceptions of the presence scale and impact of traffic-related problems. By analysing surveys of 768 drivers hr the Entamoor and Lake District National Parks, the potential success of ‘carrot’ measures is assessed and the implications for future policy addressed.     

Visitor Management in Protected Areas: From ‘Hard’ to ‘Soft’ Approaches?

Historically, visitor management in protected areas has been concerned largely with visitor impacts and emphasis has been placed on managing negative impacts. This has involved controlling visitor numbers, attempting to modify visitor behaviour and also modifying the resource. These approaches can be divided into ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ categories (Ling Kuo, 2002). ‘Hard’ visitor management approaches involve physical management, regulatory management and economic management. ‘Soft’ approaches make use of education and interpretation. While the approach of managing impacts has its merits, and has met with some success, it has tended to assume that the visitor is ‘guilty until proven innocent’ (Mason, 2002). Such an approach has also tended to ignore the role of visitor experience in relation to visitor management. This paper critically evaluates a number of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ approaches to visitor management, focusing specifically on interpretation and codes of conduct in protected natural areas in New Zealand, Australia and Antarctica. It argues that the traditional approach of managing visitor impacts should be supported by a far greater emphasis on managing visitor experience. It proposes that placing emphasis on managing visitor experience should allow a more holistic perspective to be employed, in which the visitor can be put within a context that includes both the destination community and the environment visited. Such an approach, it is argued, should not only lead to better informed and behaved visitors, but a reduction in negative visitor impacts.     

Towards the optimisation of the schedule reliability of aircraft rotations

A cost minimisation model is developed to optimise the scheduling of aircraft rotation by balancing the use of schedule time, which is designed to control flight punctuality, and delay costs. A case study is conducted using schedule and punctuality data from a European airline. Optimisation shows that the operational performance of an aircraft rotation schedule is improved in terms of: schedule regularity, mean delays and expected delays of aircraft rotation. Although the total schedule time of the study rotation is increased by 5%, a system cost saving of some $9.3 million/1000 aircraft rotations is gained after schedule optimisation. Three schedule reliability surrogates—mean delay time of aircraft rotation, expected delay time of aircraft rotation and schedule regularity—are employed to evaluate the reliability of aircraft rotation schedules. It is found that the reliability and robustness of schedule implementation is significantly improved after optimisation.     

The safe mobility of older drivers: a challenge for urban road designers

For many older adults in most of the Western world, continued mobility (with associated health, well-being, independence and quality of life) means access to a private vehicle, either as a driver or as a passenger. However older driver serious injury and fatality rates per distance travelled are higher than middle-aged drivers, and crash and injury rates are likely to increase in the coming decades as a result of the ageing population, increased car ownership and overall travel amongst older people. Evidence suggests that contributory factors to this high risk are (for most) frailty, (for some) the high proportion of driving in urban areas, and (for a few) reduced fitness to drive as a result of medical conditions and associated functional limitations. Australasia has recently adopted the ‘Safe System’ approach which aims to manage vehicles, the road infrastructure, speeds, and the interactions between these components, to ensure that when crashes do occur, crash energies will remain at levels that minimize the probability of death and serious injury. A system which aspires to achieving Safe System objectives cannot ignore the challenges that older road users pose – and will pose – to the transport system. This paper discusses the so-called ‘older driver problem’, presents crash data and evidence of the impacts of driving location and reduced fitness to drive on crash risk, and recommends countermeasures within the ‘Safe System’ context, with particular reference to urban road design and operation.