Ground Incidents – Slow Down To Go Fast – SM4 Safety News from Global Aerospace

There are approximately 27,000 ramp accidents and incidents worldwide each year. While the injury rate is about 9 per 1,000 departures, and we care deeply about the cost to our personnel, the price we pay for these mishaps goes far beyond the bodily toll.

This is not simply due to aircraft damage, but also due to the time and labor spent to repair an airframe and absorb the cost of its downtime. This can be substantial, especially in a world where airworthiness equates to profit.

The sad part is that the majority of these incidents occur due to human error. There is not one documented case of an aircraft leaping out to assault a hangar door, nor does ground equipment randomly slam into an airframe without an unfortunate assist.

Most often, it is due to many factors, with time pressure being high on the list and fatigue a close second. While every aircraft movement is unique, the circumstances leading up to incidents rarely are.

Searching for Solutions
Attributing incidents to carelessness or apathy is easy. Finding solutions and addressing contributing factors is much harder.

There are numerous programs and training efforts designed to reduce errors and mishaps. However, each comes down to the will of the individual to focus solely on the mission at hand and take a methodical, logical approach to each movement or action. We know how to conduct operations correctly, but knowing why you might do it incorrectly is another issue entirely. We must always ask ourselves “What is different about this action?”

Recognizing your own personal distractions and biases, and quite often the pulse of the aviation culture in your particular organization, can be key. Business aviation is generally a time-driven operation with pressure (often self-induced) to launch as scheduled, arrive on time, beat weather delays and keep the passengers happy. This creates pressure to move faster and sometimes trade safety for what appears, at the time, to be efficiency.

There is an old saying that,…