Since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 Pandemonics, the aviation sector has faced many unexpected challenges. In particular, the problem of job insecurity and health problems that can be infected are great stress for pilots. ICAO,...
Since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 Pandemonics, the aviation sector has faced many unexpected challenges. In particular, the problem of job insecurity and health problems that can be infected are great stress for pilots. ICAO, IFALPA, and IATA stress that pilots must be physically and emotionally healthy for flight safety.
Unexpected difficulties in aviation pose a severe threat to our safety. The threat eventually links to accidents. On May 22, 2020, PK8303, flying from Lahore to Karachi, crashed into a residential area after an insecure approach, killing 97 of the 99 passengers on board. Also, on August 7, IX1344 from Dubai to Kozhikode crashed into a valley over a runway in bad weather, killing 16 people. Those accidents show that failure to address safety-related issues in a Pandemic context can lead to near-disaster accidents. This study was initiated to explore ways to prevent accidents under the recently increased instability situations fundamentally. The safety management of the aviation sector is carried out through the Safety Management System (SMS).
However, there are limitations in dealing with all unstable situations with SMS alone. SMS is just hardware, and if the software does not work correctly, its performance will not work. For SMS to work correctly, a software safety culture must be positively formed. Even if SMS is perfect, it does not correctly respond to new safety issues if the safety culture is negatively formed. Management is necessary to transform the safety culture positively. Management requires measurement and quantification. While reviewing the literature for measuring safety culture, the airline safety culture guidelines (2017) published by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport were identified. The safety culture diagnosis site provided by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport is an ASC-IT model and compared and analyzed with the diagnosis site used in other fields to assessment its appropriateness. Furthermore, we incorporate AHP weighting methods into the study in a way that can specify the pilot.
The literature research section looked at the definition of safety, general safety management methods, and safety management concepts in aviation and reviewed the safety culture initiative, the definition of safety culture, and the stage of safety culture management. Besides, how to manage safety culture was identified in the PDCA procedure.
The conformity of safety culture diagnosis was compared and analyzed by comparing the models presented by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, and Transport with IAEA models, NOSACQ-50 and GAIN, and summarized the meaning of 21 operational definitions and sub-factors of the ASC-IT model. This study's condition is to leave the main and sub-factors of the ASC-IT model intact, and the metric that measures it is made clear that the original seeks.
Executives of the current team leader or higher who are in charge of safety management and policies at the airline for more than 20 years participated in a pair-by-side comparison with each safety culture diagnosis site and calculated the weight for each factor by reflecting the results.
The study applied the complementary metric to 10 pilots with more than ten years of experience at private airlines to compare the weighted and unweighted results. Ten samples were selected to substantially identify the difference between before and after the weight was applied. The safety culture management methods and progress were reviewed through surveys and result in analysis.
This study has limitations that are not sure if it is suitable for the Korean situation because the ASC-IT model has been used as it is. As a result, the need to develop safety culture diagnostic sites in the Korean aviation sector was also recognized. Also, the question of whether this could be used for all airlines was identified because it only reflected the opinions of the safety management experts of a particular airline. Therefore, it is necessary to expand research under the leadership of government-led or private pilots' associations.