Despite the sensitivity of most civil aviation senior managers to safety issues, safety still is a tough sell. Many aviation safety managers are seen by their chief financial officers more as necessary evils than supervisors of value centers. When asked to justify their budget requests, their rationale sometimes sounds more grounded in desperation than in sound business reasoning: “The regulator mandates it. The authority strongly recommends it. We have to do it if we want to remain part of that alliance,” are recurrent themes.
That is a pity. Safety, more than anything else, drives the reliability of an aviation organization, building and strengthening its reputation and operational effectiveness. If airline safety managers provided more convincing business cases and harder evidence, the budgeting process would be less frustrating and safety managers would see more money for their departments. The good news is that there is much evidence supporting safety as a worthwhile invest…
