AoC number

80

Primary domain

ORG

Description

In recent times there has been a reduction in the availability of qualified individuals to provide operational management, mentoring and oversight in the charter and low capacity regular public transport sector due to airline recruitment. (see item B)

The availability of skilled, resourceful and experienced individuals to undertake the roles of safety manager, check and training, chief pilots, instructors and business managers is also in short supply.

Given the decades of relative stability in the airline sector prior to 2001, the industry is not well supplied with managers at middle and senior level who have had experience in managing risks associated with considerable change.

Indicators are emerging that general aviation and the low to medium capacity regular public transport and charter sectors of passenger transport are increasingly affected by a growing shortage of experienced and skilled personnel in all categories including maintenance (item C).

Many of the major regulators in Europe are desperately short of operations inspectors, and the government budget austerity measures being taken across Europe will likely take the situation from desperate to dangerous.

Potential hazard

  1. Loss of design, operational, and maintenance knowledge
  2. Knowledge of why aircraft are designed as such, how key maintenance is to be performed, and why the operational rules are as they are not being retained by individual or organizational memory. Contributing factors include
    1. long product design cycle times
    2. extended product life
    3. increasing staff turn over.
    4. Difficult to access legacy data storage systems
  3. Inability of some operators to attract and retain senior people to mentor, guide and direct the less experienced and maintain safety systems
  4. Wholesale retirements within the current generation of aviation professionals
  5. Shortage of qualified inspectors and flight examiners
  6. The loss of experience, safety culture, and tribal knowledge may be a bigger issue than overwork and fatigue.

The longevity of aircraft designs requires access to design records that may only exist in hardcopy or software archives that are not compatible with modern data access software. Identification of safety-sensitive information within difficult to access legacy data storage systems will remain a significant challenge.

There is a risk of complacency in that operational practices and safety analyses may be blindly pursued without validating original design assumptions. Front-line staff may not be familiar with the historic rationale behind an SOP requirement

Corroborating sources and comments

In order to continue operating and meeting the demand airlines may respond by hiring less experienced personnel (changing the characteristics of the operational task), and giving rise to a number of potential safety risks.

B. Canadian report from Michael.

C. Maintenance Personnel Challenges, MRO Europe September 2010, Hank Schaeffer Manager, MT Regulatory Approvals and Standards, The Boeing Company Training and Flight Services

Organizations with robust systems in place to oversight and mentor less experienced employees may well be able to manage threats to the integrity and safety of operations. Yet in recent times there has been a reduction in the availability of experienced individuals to provide operational management, mentoring and oversight in the charter and low capacity regular public transport sector due to airline recruitment.
http://www.casa.gov.au/corporat/riskreport.pdf

When looking at the overall funding and staffing levels among European CAAs, it’s not unusual to find that within the vital inspector category staffing levels are only at 20 to 30 percent of what is required.
Austerity and Denial Op Ed piece by William R. Voss, President and CEO, Flight Safety Foundation, http://flightsafety.org/aerosafety-world-magazine/october-2011/austerity-and-denial, AEROSAFETYWORLD, October 2011

January 20, 2012 – Top FAA execs lack institutional knowledge, says official; agency must be prepared for cuts; Turnover of top executives at the Federal Aviation Administration has led to a lack of institutional knowledge at the agency, said Toni Trombecky, a 31 year veteran of the agency serving out her final months there. “It’s not that they’re making bad decisions–they’re making uninformed decisions, because they don’t have all the information that previous executives had,” said Trombecky, while speaking Jan. 20 at an event hosted by the Association of Government Accountants, in Washington, D.C. Trombecky, the manager of FAA strategic planning.
http://www.fiercegovernmentit.com/story/top-faa-execs-lack-institutional-knowledge-says-official-agency-must-be-pre/2012-01-22

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