At 22:09 28/10/2005, you wrote:
It is worth noting that the ops panel rejected our AGM motion out of
hand, claiming it was without factual basis. At the June Board
meeting, the Qld representative tabled the documented evidence
behind Qld's claims. Unfortunately, this is not reflected in the
minutes nor was there any action on the part of the board in the
light of this evidence to request that the ops panel reconsider the Qld motion.
One wonders what else occurs at these meetings that is not minuted
and so we, the membership, never find out about.
Safety is all our concern and currently we are failing to gather
adequate incident reports to allow us to find out where the problems
in our systems lie. One result of this is that we have had three
fatalities in Australia in the last 18 months. We urgently need to
(re)construct a real safety culture within the GFA. Unfortunately,
the ops panel clearly decided that it (as the functional area with
safety responsibility) is doing a very good job - despite clear
evidence to the contrary.
If three fatalities in such a short period is a good job that
requires no action or self examination...
It is worth noting that the then head of the ops panel is now our
esteemed President...amazing how the GFA hierarchy system works isn't it?
I would urge all Qld members to try to get to this meeting at
Caboolture. Even if the GFA hierarchy decides to bury its head in
the sand on these issues, there is much that we can do ourselves.
Assembling statistics on incidents (i.e. things that happened that
were not accidents but nearly were) is under way at DDSC, as is
clear accident reporting. At the recent state comp, air miss
incident information was gathered from pilots.
Local Qld initiatives like this will allow Qld to move ahead and
create a safer gliding regimen, in spite of the recalcitrance of the
ops panel and others, who will become increasingly irrelevant until
they realise that their duty of care is the the membership and not
to themselves.
Your input is both valued and necessary to the future of your sport!
Robert
Having been to the GFA Safety Seminar roadshow a couple of weeks ago
(and to the AGM - where were you?) I found it very useful and
open-cultured. I am sure the Caboolture one is not the only one
programmed for Queensland.
Your postings are developing a certain same-ness about them - are you
sure it is not you that is misreading the signals?
Under-reporting of incidents is not confined to gliding by any
stretch of the imagination and I would urge all readers to put in a
report on anything that could have potential to create a threat to
the safety of someone else in the future - remember the objective of
incident reporting is to help prevent accidents, and accident and
incident reporting and investigation are no-blame ways to improve
everybody's safety.
Likewise, the randomness of accident occurrence is such that the
presence of accidents is NOT a measure of lack of safety culture, any
more than the presence of accidents is an indicator of the presence
of such culture, or of "safety" (whatever that is). This is well
shown by three fatal jet transport accidents in a month recently
worldwide, that collectively killed more people than died in air
transport accidents for the whole of 2004. Travel by jet has NOT
suddenly become 20 times more dangerous than it was last year, and
worldwide accident rates continue to decline - though there are very
large and significant regional variations.
Also be aware of changes in the way safety professionals treat the
collection of data - and the allocation of causality to accident
factors. You may not be doing yourself any favours by trying to
collect data from a too-small sample.
Watch out for the appearance of the term "Threat and Error
Management" in developing safety programs over the next 12 months -
we are all human, and error is a human trait. Rather than seeking
divine forgiveness or "eliminating errors" we must learn to manage
our personal and collective failures.
One of the best ways to do this is to observe standard operating
procedures - and a culture that does not do this is less safe than it
might be, but not so much less safe than a culture that rebels and
rejects standard operating procedures rather than developing them
within the culture.
Wombat
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