Improving airline safety begins with knowing what went wrong

After a tragic week for the airline industry, it is time to find out exactly happened and make sure it never happens again, argues Justin Thomas

Debris at the crash site of the Germanwings Flight 4U 9525 in the French Alps. Sebastien Nogier / EPA

Aviation has an outstanding safety record. Part of the reason is that the stakes are so high; human error or mechanical failure might instantly cost hundreds of lives. Compare this to health care, where human errors, euphemistically referred to as “patient safety incidents”, typically result in the death or injury of a single patient at a time. Unsurprisingly, during the latter part of the 20th century, when the health care system began looking at ways to improve patient safety, it turned its eyes towards the aviation industry.

Part of the aviation industry’s success is the development of what has been described as a “safety culture”. At its heart is a simple idea that can be summarised as: human beings will always make errors, so let’s focus on systems rather than look for individuals to blame. In this context, investigations aim to identify which aspects of the system potentially contributed to the human error, or failed to prevent it occurring. This style of investigation gives rise to questions such as: how can we change things so that when this human error occurs again, we can better prevent it, detect it or mitigate its consequences?

The upside of this type of focus is that systems are continuously improved, making errors less likely to happen, easier to detect and less catastrophic when they do occur. This system focus leads to a culture where employees feel encouraged and empowered to report errors and near misses. And so, valuable lessons are learnt and systems further improved – a truly virtuous cycle. There are reports that some airlines even reward employees for spotting and reporting errors.

In a blame-focused culture, however, people are more likely to sweep things under the carpet, and cover their own backs for fear of losing their livelihoods. This generally means lessons go unlearnt and scapegoats (not always the most culpable individuals) are regularly sacrificed or dismissed to appease public opinion. Rarely does this do any­thing to avert similar incidents. If anything, it further heightens the climate of fear and blame and promotes the cult of the cover-up.

Another important element of the aviation industry’s safety culture is the relative transparency and desire to share the learning from safety incidents. The solutions to previous incidents and near misses are shared broadly across the industry. Underpinning this sharing is the idea that human beings, be they Taiwanese, Emirati or German, will always make errors. If it happened here, it could happen there.

The UAE is home to the world’s busiest airport and two of the world’s leading airlines, and so learning the lessons from the recent Germanwings tragedy is particularly important here. The crash of Flight 4U 9525 in the French alps last Tuesday has been attributed to the deliberate actions of the co-pilot.

Why a pilot would crash a plane, killing himself and all on board, can’t be assessed from the data recorded on the black box. This type of information is stored in the mysterious black box of the human mind, which is hard to access at the best of times. Some have speculated about the mental health of the co-pilot, suggesting that the crash may have been an act of murder-suicide.

There is no single word in English for the act of taking your own life while simultaneously taking the lives of others. The absence of a word for this type of act underlines its rarity. But murder-suicide happens and it will happen again. Last week’s Germanwings tragedy is not the first aviation disaster where murder-suicide has been suspected. In 1999, an EgyptAir flight bound for Cairo plummeted into the Atlantic 33 minutes after taking off from New York, killing all 217 people on-board. Investigators suspected co-pilot suicide. There are at least seven other examples, although the investigators’ findings are typically always disputed by the airline in question.

If murder-suicide is ultimately deemed to be the cause of the Germanwings tragedy, what could be done to minimise the likelihood of recurrence? For one, we might start to review and improve our systems for promoting the mental health of pilots and flight crew, while being careful not to further stigmatise mental health problems. We might also re-examine protocols governing who can be alone in the cockpit during a flight. In an official statement on the Germanwings disaster, the British Psychological Society said it was willing to engage in discussions about monitoring and safeguarding pilot mental health. We cannot always predict human behaviour and we can’t always prevent it, but we can learn from tragedy and we can reduce the likelihood of the same things happening again.

Justin Thomas is an associate professor of psychology at Zayed University

On Twitter: @DrJustinThomas