I recently participated in a gathering organized by the U.S. National Highway Transportation Safety Administration NHTSA). Administrator Mark Rosekind, who previously served as a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, assembled group of safety people from airlines and automakers to discuss the safety lessons learned in the aviation industry. We heard testimonials about the early days of gathering information on close calls, about the sometimes tense moments when stakeholders came together to discuss ways to improve safety, and about the formation of the U.S. Commercial Aviation Safety Team (CAST).
Since those early days, CAST has done a lot to spearhead voluntary safety enhancements, where the government is NOT involved in pushing legislation and regulation to force improvements. At CAST meetings, government and industry sit side-by-side to look at the biggest risk issues and the associated data and decide together what can be done. Airline safety leader…
