Industry Insights

Both terms, in the early 1990s, slowly started appearing in aviation publications, seminars and the aviation safety lexicon after release of an NTSB fatal accident report. The report concerned the Brent Airways, Inc. d/b/a Continental Express, Embraer EMB 120 Brasilia in-flight breakup fatal accident over Texas on September, 11 1991, ref. NTSB/AAR-92/04.

Incidentally, this accident and the earlier 1988 Aloha B737 spectacular upper fuselage peal-back accident and the later 1996 ValuJet DC-9 oxygen generator cargo hold fire accidents, finally resulted in the tipping point of increased serious concern for maintenance organizational and management shortcomings. Heretofore, this area, maintenance organizations, had received lower priority due to industry and regulatory deserved fixations on pilot error, and air traffic control and airport accident causation.

The EMB 120 investigation revealed that screws had been removed from the left horizontal stabilizer leading edge/de-ice boot during maintenance the night before the accident and, following a shift change, the whole upper row of 47 screws were not reinstalled. The plane crashed on its second flight of the next day from a horizontal leading edge loss and following pitch aerodynamic diversions/vibrations with the loss of all 14 passengers and two crewmen.

The operator’s maintenance work and quality assurance were found lacking as was FAA operator oversight, said the report. The report carried a dissenting statement by NTSB board member, Dr. John Lauber, "... the probable cause could have included the failure of Continental Express management to establish a corporate culture which encouraged and enforced adherence to approved maintenance and quality assurance procedures." The phrases "corporate or company or organization safety culture" have been used before in other industry safety contexts but up until then had not entered aviation parlance.

So now for nearly 15 years aviation "safely culture/climate" has been mouthed and used in print by consultants, change agents, safety gurus, operators and regulators but a uniform or standard definition doesn’t seem to exist.

However, in 2002, at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), a research paper titled, "Safety Culture: A Concept in Chaos?" was presented reviewing the different and similar understandings or definitions of the terms "safety culture" and "safety climate." FAA AC120-92, Introduction to Safety Management Systems (SMS) for Air Operators, issued 2006, provides a good safety culture definition.

The paper, by a group from the University of Illinois, went on, in part, by listing seven definitions of safety culture and three for safety climate and then synthesized a single definition for both which follows:

Safety Culture — The enduring value and priority placed on worker and public safety by everyone in every group of an organization. It refers to the extent to which individuals and groups will commit to personal responsibility for safety; act to preserve, enhance and communicate safety concerns; strive to actively learn, adapt and modify (both individual and organizational) behavior based on lessons learned from mistakes; and be rewarded in a manner consistent with these values.

Safety Climate — The temporal state measure of safety culture, subject to commonalities among individual perceptions of the organization. It is therefore situationally based, refers to the perceived state of safety at a particular place at a particular time, is relatively unstable, and subject to change depending on the features of the current environment or prevailing conditions.

The foregoing cogent setting out of both terms allows us to reread and dwell on the component and interconnect parts within and between each safety concept; culture and climate. This may individually result also in relating to other supporting concepts/constructs such as pairings or contrastings like macro and micro, strategic and tactical, horizontal and vertical, etc. and so culture and climate can fit in or blend in with our existing conceptual couplings we’re familiar with.

The HFES paper ends stating the benefits of common definitions for both terms are:

• More systematic methodology for measuring organizational dimensions.

• Common standard for or benchmarking "good" safety cultures.

• Enable researchers to share information and strategies for improving safety culture.

Well, getting back to this article’s title challenge, how did you do with your definitions? Probably like me, you found the research paper nearly got it right — just kidding. Although I felt I knew the subjects fairly well, I wasn’t as sharp as I thought. But now I can articulate the terms and hope you can too, or at least you’re growing to be part of that learning, just committed, personal responsibility, etc. (you know the rest of it by now) safety culture too.