The safety approach of the industrial age until the closing years of the 20th century was founded on the notion that safety is defined by its opposite: by what happens when safety is missing. This means that safety is measured indirectly, not by its presence or as a property in and of itself, but by its absence or as Hollnagel (2012) describes it, the consequence of its absence. This approach is preoccupied and focused with what goes wrong and improved safety performance is achieved by determining the causal factors(s) that led to the event, incidents and accidents, errors, failures and other inadequacies within socio-technical systems and then removing or mitigating these same causal factors. This reduces the socio-technical system behaviour (which is often complex) to one of a simple cause and effect relationship, intrinsically linear.

Historically speaking therefore, accidents and incidents explained by such a simplistic cause and effect relationship – irrespective of the simple or complex nature of the system itself – reduces or decomposes the safety problem space to a vignette and we no longer notice the implicit model behind our thinking.

Three prominent and widely used models of this perspective of safety science are:

• The “Barrier Model” (Heinrich)
• The ‘Iceberg’ Model’ (Heinrich)
• The ‘Swiss Cheese’ model (Reason)

A number of methods have been developed that provide the means to describe and assess systems behaviours to determine hazards e.g., fault tree, bow tie, SAM, Human Reliability Analysis and Tripod, just to mention a few. These have all have been developed on the principal that systems fail because of the combination of multiple small failures which are each individually insufficient to drive a complex system to fail in some way. This analysis then yields to the quantification of risk and assumes mitigations to these risks. Frequently it is observed that such analyses use the human component as the mitigation strategy to manage this identified risk. This approach is often called the linear model.

ICAO Safety Management Panel – Objectives

IFATCA is represented on the ICAO Safety Management Panel (SMP). The objectives of the panel are, inter alia (ICAO, 2020):

• Analyzing the needs of the aviation stakeholders (States and Service Providers) with respect to the collection, analysis, sharing and exchange of safety data and safety information.
• Contributing to the ongoing development of the Safety Management Manual, (SMM) (Doc 9859) which provides guidance on the high level requirements contained in Annex 19 – Safety Management.
• Identifying, developing and validating practical examples and tools in support of the ongoing understanding and use of data and information collection, analysis, sharing and exchange, including examples and tools submitted to ICAO for posting on the Safety Management Implementation website.
• Ensuring proper liaison takes place with other ICAO Expert Groups where there is a need for co-ordination on safety data and information collection, analysis, sharing and exchange related issues.
• Supporting the aviation Industry in practically implementing the Annex 19 SARPs in relation to safety data and information collection, analysis, sharing and exchange, that meets the intent of the language and effectively measures and improves safety performance amongst the aviation industry.
• Ensuring the effective use and implementation of these SARPs will allow for the vision of Safety Management to be realized, with a mature aviation system that can proactively and predictively manage safety risk, leveraging advances in computing technologies and increased data availability.
• Developing proposals for the amendment of Annex 19 and future revisions of the ICAO SMM that improve aviation safety without creating a regulatory burden for Service Providers.
  Identifying appropriate material that is consistent with ICAO provisions to support all stakeholders with respect of the collection, analysis, sharing and exchange of safety data and information to support effective Safety Management.