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Guest Editorial


Merlin Preuss

The Aviation Safety Letter(ASL) continues to be an essential vehicle to provide important safety-related information to the civil aviation community. With the advent of the guest-editorial initiative, the ASL has given a voice to key Transport Canada Civil Aviation(TCCA) leaders-leaders who play significant roles in promoting aviation safety in Canada and in leading the change required to allow the industry to continuously improve its safety performance.

In the 40 years since I joined the air force, flying in itself hasn't changed all that much, although advancing technology has made the experience safer and more efficient. The pace of technological change, however, has slowed, and its potential to further dramatically improve safety performance has all but disappeared. The search for ways to improve safety performance has led us down a path away from technical solutions-a path that TCCA took over ten years ago.

In the last ten years, TCCA has been moving toward its vision of an integrated and progressive civil aviation system that promotes a proactive safety culture. While the number of aircraft occurrences is at an all-time low, the aviation industry must continue to strive for the highest level of safety. There will always be risks in aviation, and any lack of attention could quickly reverse this positive trend in safety performance. It is now a question of how we manage risk and what we do to prevent incidents in the first place that is vital and increasingly difficult. Industry growth and globalization have become catalysts to challenge our past practices, providing us with opportunities today to make improvements for the future.

The aviation industry is made up of specialists from various disciplines who rely on each other to make aviation a successful and safe enterprise. Each discipline has a unique and separate culture with unique and separate traditions. In trying to make cultural changes, we recognized the need to better integrate the separate skills and knowledge in order to manage the risks to a far greater extent than ever before. In times of transition, you can choose to lead, or you can choose to follow. On behalf of Canadians, we at TCCA chose to lead the world in adopting safety management systems(SMS) in all areas of aviation activity-a significant and logical step towards improving safety performance by fully engaging all industry participants in turning safety into a value and not just a priority in our day-to-day activities.

Under SMS, aviation organizations are expected to continuously and proactively identify hazards to safe operations and assess and manage the associated risks, never losing sight of the fact that non-compliance with a regulation is, by definition, a hazard to safe operations. Identifying threats to safety before they arise makes good business sense-but it also ultimately saves lives. Recognizing the potential benefits of a risk management-based approach to decision making in the pursuit of organizational excellence, TCCA applied and implemented the principles of SMS to its own organization. We now maintain a systems approach to the management of all risks to our aviation safety program through the Integrated Management System(IMS). In implementing the system, TCCA faces the same challenges as industry in overcoming resistance to change as new processes and procedures are introduced that support a change in culture towards a transparent, risk assessment-based decision-making process.

A decade later, I believe we are entitled to look back on a solid record of achievement. Though the benefits of these systems are not always obvious in everyday operations, I'm confident that we are making significant progress day by day. The level of industry engagement is high, which can largely be attributed to the hard work of inspectors in promoting the importance of SMS. By implementing both SMS and IMS, we are successfully creating a culture where every segment of the aviation community is responsible for aviation safety.

Today we have a robust SMS in place in airline operations and in their maintenance organizations, which means 95percent of the passenger miles flown by Canadian air operators are subject to SMS regulations. Within the next three years, if not sooner, the navigation service providers and airports will be subject to these new requirements as they go through the implementation phases.

I am proud of what we have achieved together in these last few years. A great deal was expected of the industry and of TCCA employees, and all have risen to the challenge of making the business of flying not only safer than ever before but deserving of the continued public trust in safe air operations in Canada.

Merlin Preuss
Director General
Civil Aviation

Date modified:
2010-05-20