While safety culture is a topic of keen interest in business aviation, measuring the health of a safety culture in the operational setting of a specific organization remains a challenge — one that persists partly because academic researchers in this field typically have focused almost exclusively on large, commercial air transport operators and have ignored business aviation operators. Considering that the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) predicts that turbine-powered business aircraft will average 12.5 million flight hours annually between now and 2034, the lack of attention seems to be more than a minor oversight.1 One result is that operators may lack a sound basis for evaluating the quality of the nonpublic, proprietary safety culture measurement tools on the market.
I reached this conclusion after surveying related academic literature and aviation industry sources as part of my planned doctoral dissertation on the effectiveness of the International Standard…
