When Michael Huerta, administrator of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), said in March that “we need to make aviation even safer by being smarter about how we do safety,” my ears perked up slightly. I was attending the Federal Aerospace Forecast Conference in Washington, organized by the American Association of Airport Executives, and I didn’t expect to hear much talk about safety. I was there for the numbers, which Huerta addressed, but he also touched on the first of FAA’s four strategic priorities: “Make aviation safer and smarter.”
I began scribbling notes a little faster when Huerta started talking about the need to focus on risk-based decision making and relying on safety data input by the people who work in the system — such as the flight crews, controllers, dispatchers, cabin crews, mechanics and specialists within manufacturers and airports. “When you’re faced with a system in which commercial fatalities are the rarest of the rare events, movi…
