Regulation or criminalisation: What determines legal standards of safety culture in commercial aviation?

Abstract This paper highlights that further development of safety culture as a quantifiable standard presents a considerable dilemma to policy makers. The imposition of legal standards in any area of human endeavour is generally predicated on the assumption that the affected parties are aware of their causal role and therefore legal responsibilities. An intuitive response to this expectation would be to provide a well-defined, measurable and manageable structure of safety culture. However, we will consider whether that by presenting an effective safety culture as an achievable final goal, safety performance could be compromised in the long-term. Identified in numerous case studies (presented in two tables), the contrary approach of leaving safety culture as a loosely defined and adaptable concept, allows the criminal justice systems the opportunity to criminalise those safety cultures perceived as being inadequate, in the aftermath of a fatal accident. This approach encourages hindsight bias and potentially inhibits the development of reporting cultures within organisations. Should fear of exposure to retrospective analysis by the criminal justice system inhibit the free flow of information, organisational learning would be inhibited. Restrictions to the rate and quality of safety reporting remains one of the greatest challenges to the effectiveness of SMS across commercial aviation at operator, national and international level.