Aviation is the safest form of transportation. How many times have you heard that? How many times have you said that? But people outside the industry — and even some in it — sometimes don’t understand that safety is not a destination that you reach and then move onto other matters. Safety is dynamic. There is always more work to be done.
It’s not good enough to keep accident rates at current levels because, as traffic increases, the absolute number of accidents will increase if everything else stays the same. So, we must continue to drive down the accident rate. We cannot afford to be complacent and adopt the mantle of “good enough.”
Of course, saying we need to continually drive down accident rates and improve safety is much easier than actually doing it.
The future of aviation safety is about moving beyond the traditional approach of learning from past accidents to a predictive approach focused on detecting risk and implementing mitigation strategies before accid…
