Standardized Measures of Safety: Finding Global Common Ground for Safety Metrics

In an interconnected global industry like aviation, commonality of an organization’s safety language and its performance measurements are critical. Entire air transportation systems are forming in countries that will soon compete in a rapidly changing and competitive multinational aviation marketplace. This growth also poses a risk to the tremendous safety record currently enjoyed in aviation around the world. As global outsourcing and supply chains in aviation become the norm, it has become evident that safety goals and standards, even when mandated and accepted by regulatory agencies around the world, can vary widely company to company and internationally, culture to culture. Standardized measures of what is safe performance and who should perform certain risk management activities are still being grappled with throughout the industry. One avenue for standardizing measures of organizational safety performance is being investigated in Purdue University’s Department of Aviation Technology. Targeting aviation operators of flight and technical maintenance services, researchers are pursuing the difficult task of identifying and evaluating outcomes-based assessments of an organization’s safety and risk readiness. This paper discusses initial steps and preliminary research on this difficult road to development, and the pursuit of performance based safety metrics in aviation