Airline leaders who hold corporate purse strings appreciate safe flight operations as much as anyone. Yet, paradoxically, an already-high level of safety these days could make them balk if their director of safety proposes improvements yielding vague financial returns. So safety specialists increasingly are challenged to make a business case — not just a safety case — complete with convincing return-on-investment (ROI) calculations and time factors, according to John Cox, a retired airline captain and chief executive officer of Safety Operating Systems, and Triant Flouris, professor and dean of academic affairs, Hellenic American University.
In a presentation to Flight Safety Foundation’s 64th annual International Air Safety Seminar (IASS) in Singapore in November, Cox and Flouris recommended that safety management systems (SMSs) incorporate sophisticated financial analysis, beginning with tools such as a Microsoft Excel worksheet that they developed to assess safety intervent…
