Tuesday Edition: IASS 2025

Safety Depends on More Than Technology

Safety Should be Integrated in Strategies and Across Teams

Safety is not only the remit of the safety department but also should be an essential element of an organization’s strategy and integrated across its teams and departments, according to safety leaders who spoke during Tuesday morning’s executive panel that focused on Flight Safety Foundation’s recently released “Seven Essential Principles of Aviation Safety Leadership” blueprint.

“Safety should be a core part of decision-making,” said Capt. Mark Cameron, executive manager, Qantas Group safety. Safety leadership is about owning safety and driving accountability in your team and throughout an organization, he said. “When you’re a safety leader … everyone expects you to talk about safety. The real victory comes when a non-safety person talks first about safety.”Sasha Johnson, vice president of corporate safety at United, and others on the panel talked about the importance of constantly nurturing and reinforcing an organization’s safety culture and regularly recognizing and celebrating individuals for their actions and reports that lead to safety improvements or help prevent mishaps. “You have to keep at it,” she said. “It’s not something you can do once and expect it to stick. Every month, we share things that have changed because of someone filing a voluntary safety report.”

Yannick Malinge, senior vice president, head of Aviation Safety, Airbus, said the aviation industry is adept at handling problems and issues that arise, but tends to forget all the prevention activities that, when successful, are not visible. Safety leaders need to have a strong vision of what needs to be done and they need to convince people that even when something is right, there is still more work to do. Malinge also talked about the importance of transferring experience to organizational newcomers and the value of learning from the positive and why things went right.

Capt. Kazu Tachibana, executive vice president, Japan Airlines Aviofuture Lab, said that putting into action the idea that safety comes first can be a challenge sometimes. He said that when he was flying, he always told new first officers that their job was to speak up, and that he always told captains to accept challenges from their first officers. It’s important that organizations motivate all employees to speak up, even though the employees may not always be right, he said.

The panel discussion was moderated by Foundation President and CEO Dr. Hassan Shahidi, who earlier in the program said the Foundation was kicking off a global campaign to accelerate adoption of the Seven Essential Principles by engaging the entire aviation community through webinars, workshops, and polls designed to identify what works, reveal gaps, and develop shared benchmarks.

Strengthening Mental Health in Aviation

Emotional intelligence is a strong predictor of one’s ability to have psychological resilience, United Airlines first officer and research scientist Kimberly Perkins, Ph.D., said during a panel discussion on strengthening mental health in aviation. Perkins said there is an expectation that pilots are good at emotional intelligence, but the reality is that pilots in one study actually scored lower than the general public. She said emotional intelligence should be incorporated into current aviation training systems.

Capt. Dave Fielding, chair, International Peer Assist Aviation Coalition (IPAAC), talked about the importance and efficacy of peer support programs. He said that 75 to 80 percent of cases taken to peer support programs are resolved without going any further. He also advocated for integrating mental health and related data into safety management systems, and to more effectively and routinely look at psychological aspects during accident and serious incident investigations.

Guadalupe Cortes Obrero, Ph.D., researcher at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and an air traffic controller, said -being is not a personal luxury but a safety factor and business driver. She said well-being is not just personal, but organizational, as well. When people feel valued and supported, their judgment is better, they make fewer errors, recover faster, and make smarter decisions, she said. The human is the most flexible, adaptable, and valuable component of the aviation system, but also the most vulnerable, she said.

Fielding added that the concept that accidents happen at the end of a very long chain of events is well known; we need to bring that across to the mental health world, he said.

Mental Health UPRT for Error Reduction

Historically, many aviation safety issues have been mitigated with improved technology, such as EGPWS or upset prevention and recovery training (UPRT), said Capt. Herwin Bongers of IPAAC in his flash talk “Mental Health UPRT for Error Reduction.” The aviation industry does not know what mistakes are being caused by impaired mental wellness because the industry does not collect that type of data, he said. Mental health overload is implicated in accidents and incidents, just as a lack of manual flying proficiency was implicated in loss of control in flight. He called for collecting data and enacting a collaborative, multi-pronged methodological framework that addresses the human factors involved.

Crafting a Safety Culture That Sticks

Trust is the basis of safety culture. That message was repeated multiple times Tuesday, but particularly during the panel discussion on Crafting a Safety Culture That Sticks – Principles, Practices and Progress.

“Trust is the absolute bedrock,” said Capt. Mark Burtonwood, divisional senior vice president, Group Safety and Network Operations, Emirates. “If you don’t have trust, you have silence, and that’s the absolute enemy of safety.”

Jason Ragogna, managing director, corporate safety, Delta Air Lines, said that “creating a safety culture that sticks starts with the recognition that the entire safety management system (SMS) … has to work together.” He also said that sound risk management must be integrated throughout a company.

Capt. Haig Anyonyi, director, Corporate Quality, Safety and Environment, Kenya Airways, said it’s important to be a “learning organization.” He said that being a learning organization and learning “why we do safety and why it’s important” is crucial.

Capt. Pedro André, president, Portuguese Airline Pilots Association, said it is important to introduce safety concepts in flight schools. “We need to talk about safety from day one” so that young professionals will not be afraid to submit reports about safety issues, he said. “Safety is a continuing journey, from day one of flight school to the end of our careers,” he said.

Ragogna said leaders need to do four things:

Be a good listener; listen without judging.
Be accountable; the way leaders hold themselves accountable can spread through an organization.
Support safety timeouts; leaders should encourage people to slow down the operation if they have safety concerns.
Recognize people for doing things correctly; it shows others that this really matters.

Burtonwood agreed that it is important for leaders to make space for people to be open and honest. “Don’t delegate. Be a willing listener,” he said.

Assessing Safety Culture

In his flash talk on assessing safety culture, Capt. Francesco Gaetani, flight standards director and chief pilot, European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), outlined the agency’s new safety culture assessment tool that will be used to assess the safety culture at air operators where EASA has oversight responsibility. The tool is currently in a validation process involving four volunteer carriers, and the results of the validation are expected next year.

Gaetani said that safety culture, while difficult to measure, affects the whole organization and, one way or another, shapes that organization. He said that effective oversight requires an open dialogue, strong safety culture, and mutual trust.

SMS Journey for OEMs

Successfully driving change in an organization requires getting everyone engaged, but particularly the frontline managers, said Christopher Dyer, Product Safety Officer and vice president, Product Safety, Certification and Validation, Pratt & Whitney, during a wide-ranging panel discussion on the safety management system (SMS) journey of original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). He added that people who are closest to a product understand the need for change more quickly than people in an organization who are further away from the product.

Jon Wandless, director of Safety and Airworthiness, Rolls-Royce, said leadership is vital and that without leadership, nothing really happens. “Leaders can emerge anywhere in an organization,” he said. “We try to foster that culture. No matter where you are [in an organization], you can be a leader.”

Terri Braun-Voutsas, executive director of Flight Safety, GE Aerospace, said safety must start at the top. If a leader does not buy into this, you’re not going to have an organization with an effective safety culture, she said.

Chris McGregor, flight safety officer, ATR, said it is important to recognize that there are different interpretations of SMS, starting with what’s written in Annex 19, and what is then developed and implemented in different States and organizations. He said the industry needs to work together to implement SMS and managing safety. “As much energy as we put into our internal systems, we have to put into the ecosystem so we’re all moving forward,” he said. “Being satisfied with what your own organization is doing is not enough.”

Braun-Voutsas made a similar point, saying that OEMs “need to bring the supply chain along with us” and that not all suppliers are equal in their safety management ability.

Procedural Drift and SOP Deviations

Standard operating procedures (SOPs) are designed to safeguard safety margins in complex operations, but procedural drift occurs when crews gradually adapt, bypass, or shortcut SOPs under pressure. That was one of the primary messages of the panel discussion that closed Day 1 of IASS 2025.

Capt. Henry Donohoe, senior vice president, Group Head Safety, Security, Quality, ERP & Medical, Air India, said that procedural drift is gradual and that it’s only when there is a triggering event that people realize that things were going wrong for quite a while. “Procedural drift just creeps up on you,” he said.

Capt. Conor Nolan, Director Safety and Security, Aer Lingus, said cultural aspects should be considered when discussing SOPs and compliance. Nolan and Dr. Kristine Kiernan, Associate Professor, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, both made the point that while SOP compliance is foundational to safety, it is also important to realize that humans have the ability to adapt.