Creating Safer Systems: Proactive Integrated Risk Assessment Technique

Major aircraft accidents are typically followed by intensive investigations to identify and address the range of factors that contributed to the event. Contemporary examples of this are the 2001 Milan Linate runway collision, the 2002 Uberlingen mid-air collision, the 2006 mid-air collision over the rainforests of Brazil, the 2007 Yogyakarta and Congonhas-Sao Paulo runway overrun accidents, and this year’s terrible crash at Madrid Barajas. Such events are tragic for those directly affected and provoke strong emotional reactions within the aviation community and broader society. Safety investigation methods for learning from and preventing recurrence of these accidents have evolved considerably over the past 20 years. One key improvement has been the transition to systemic safety occurrence analysis methods. Examples of these include Tripod (Doran & van der Graaf, 1996; Hudson et al, 1994), the Incident Cause Analysis Method (ICAM; BHP Corporate Safety, 2000), AcciMap (Rasmussen, 1997; Hopkins, 2000), the Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS; Wiegmann & Shappell, 2003) and the Systemic Occurrence Analysis Methodology (SOAM; EUROCONTROL, 2005). Although these techniques have their differences, they share a number of common attributes: