There has been some talk recently about the fact that air transport safety advances seem to have stalled.  Apparently, according to a recent Flight International article, global aviation safety has stopped improving for the first time in the history of aviation. 

Some may argue that we may have got to the point of diminishing returns.  I do not hold that view but believe that the root cause should be identified and addressed. 

There could be a number of subtle issues which singularly or in combination have come together to temporarily halt the improvements to aviation safety.  These may include, shortage of flight crew in the early part of this millennium, continued technical advancement and crew member’s ability to assimilate and use it effectively, the global financial crisis, the oil crisis of 2008, exceptionally cold winters in the northern hemisphere, the proliferation of low cost business models etc.  There are probably dozens of other possibilities.

My brief examination of fatal and significant non fatal accidents for the period from January 2009 until the end of June 2009 indicates that human failures feature in nearly every accident.  The notable exception is the ditching of the US Airways A320 in the Hudson River, where the evidence indicates that human intervention saved the lives of everyone on board.

Whilst the flight crew is the last line of safety defence, occasionally, this defence fails and people start to look upstream of the crew for root causes.  In any event, the disturbing thing is that in the accident summaries that I have reviewed, opportunities to prevent the accident by the flight crew or others were not acted upon.

In this age of increasing technical sophistication and automation, I note a number of losses of control accidents where the automation and technology may have confused the crew, when things went wrong.  Clearly more training is one element of a possible solution; not just more of the same type of training but training which addresses the safety issues identified globally.

Finally, the effective implementation of safety management systems (SMS) should assist in identifying operator specific training issues, and a proactive and generative safety culture will ensure that all staff are trained to understand their role in the safety chain.  We all have a role to play but sometimes in spite of all of our controls and preparations, the flight crew will still be the last line of defence!