Airline Safety Management: The development of a proactive safety mechanism model for the evolution of safety management system

摘要

The systemic origins of many accidents have led to heightened interest in the way inwhich organisations identify and manage risks within the airline industry. Theactivities which are thought to represent the term "organisational accident", "safetyculture" and "proactive approach" are documented and seek to explain the fact thatairlines differ in their willingness and ability to conduct safety management. However,an important but yet relatively undefined task in the airline industry is toconceptualise the safety mechanism in proactive safety, and its influential factors.What is required is a model of a proactive safety mechanism which builds uponexisting knowledge of what is thought to contribute to safety by adding an increasedknowledge of the organisational factors. These factors not only serve to influence thesafety mechanism, but also serve to be the predictors of the performance of safetymanagement system.This thesis aims to fill that gap. It firstly conducts an overview of the current airlinesafety management system literature and identifies the strengths and weaknesses ofthe current system. Given the need to explore the important but undefined field, aproactive safety mechanism model is then developed and tested to identify theorganisational factors which exert an influence upon the safety mechanism.Four hypotheses were set out to be tested in an attempt to justify themulti-dimensional and complex nature of the safety mechanism model. The model isthen tested by applying it to a past accident (case study) and a survey of opinions withquestionnaire. The results of this research work show that the safety mechanismmodel is a model of the evolution of safety management system in the context ofproactive safety management. Further study can apply the proposed model to there-organisation of an airline safety management system and evaluate the impact uponthe company's system. It leads to the suggestion that an airline's safety health andperformance needs the co-ordination of both retroactive and proactive safetymanagement, and concludes that the ultimate contribution of this research is toprovide airlines with reliable data, applicable references and a practicablemethodology to enable their safety management system to evolve at a fundamentally"genetic" level.