Flight Global conference 15/16 September 2015
IFA Magazine Article by Paul Merrick
The September Flight Global Safety conference was well attended. There were three themes for delegates to choose from at this event; Engineering and Maintenance, Commercial Fight safety and ATC.
There were a number of really significant and interesting sessions and the delegates were able to “mix and match” theindividual presentations from these areas. The speakers were good and credible however the involvement of Global NAA’s ICAO and EASA would significantly increase the value and credibility of these conferences.
These events are an opportunity for IFA toeither; facilitate a session, speak on a panel or make a presentation, to promote airworthiness and to influence the organisers and the airline industry that the use of terminology such as “engineering and maintenance” should be, “initial and continuing airworthiness” which is under the umbrella of the former. This was achieved by facilitating the Engineering and Maintenance session and continued during networking breaks.
Networking in these events is beneficialfor IFA, they provide maximum facilitation with extended breaks for tea, coffee and lunch. From IFA’s perspective it was beneficial to attend a selection of flight safety and Engineering sessions, to gain a complete spectrum of current views on SMS, data analysis, FRMS, etc. across the industry and formulate a view on how these can impact airworthiness in AMO, CAMO Production and Design organisations.
There is however a concern with these types of eventswhich are becoming more expensive to attend and more about the organisers’ commercial benefit than the focus on safety benefits to delegates and the industry. One could also observe that these events in certain areas seem to be going over the same ground over and over againand the balance between the organisers commercial viability for the event and the outcome value could become unbalanced.
The following presentations were of particular relevance and importance,we will provide the link to the presentations when made available from the organisers.
- Integrating and embedding SMS across the maintenance business enterprise
- A review and update on aviation safety for engineering and maintenance, can the industry really address the problem?
- Analysis of New Occurrence Reporting Regulation 376/2014: What does it mean?
- Panel Discussion: A review and update on aviation safety in Europe
- Managing data within Performance Based Oversight
- Finding the next accident before it finds you
- Analysing the vulnerabilities of SMS
- Improving your SMS
- Supporting an SMS through the use of Technology
- Lessons learnt from Turkish Airlines Flight 1951
- Staying alert with Fatigue risk management in both operations and maintenance
There were some practical examples included in the presentations on the collection, manipulation and analysis of data to get real time evidence of how things work and what it costs;which potentially saves the business in financialterms. However the interface betweenthe operational Commercial flight safety and the airworthiness issues in AMO’s, CAMO’sproduction and design organisations has scope for improvementatthese conferences. There are a still a number of issues overlapping between operations and airworthiness that need to be joined seamlessly up to move forward with improving safety performance in Aviation.