The INDICATE safety program: evaluation of a method to proactively improve airline safety performance

A number of recent and highly publicised fatal aircraft accidents, within the Australian regional airline industry, has highlighted the need for operators of regular public transport aircraft to be more proactive in identifying and addressing aviation safety hazards. Despite this need, there are currently few proactive safety management programs that are practical, simple, cost effective and which reliably demonstrate improvements in airline safety performance. This paper outlines a new proactive airline safety program called INDICATE (Identifying Needed Defences In the Civil Aviation Transport Environment) that has been applied within the Australian regional airline industry. To evaluate the INDICATE program, a major Australian regional airline agreed to implement the program in one of its operational bases while another base was used as a control group. Five evaluation criteria were applied to determine whether the program would have a positive influence on the airline's safety performance. These criteria included airline safety culture, staff risk perception of aviation safety hazards, willingness of staff to report safety hazards, action taken on identified safety hazards and staff comments about safety management within the airline. Results from the trial suggest that the program can have a positive influence on airline safety performance, specifically: improving staff confidence in how safety is managed, increasing staff willingness to report safety hazards and incidents, improving organisational safety culture and reducing staff perceptions of the severity and likelihood of safety hazards occurring within the airline. The success of the trial has resulted in a number of Australian and International airlines adopting the program.