"Quality is Safety" In the airlines. Please Help!

F

Flyboy

Dear friends

I have recently been nominated as Quality Manager of an airline. My experience in aviation is quite extensive but in Quality Management I have had little experience. I was very inerested to read a lot of your comments on various quality issues. I am trying to get a broad view of how Quality and Safety can or cannot work together. I would appreciate all your comments (especially if any airline people are reading this) on the following.

Can quality and safety go hand in hand or can one restrict the other?
Shall I be pushing qulity - and safety will follow or vise versa?
If they should be kept separetly can one comlement the other and how?

Thanks
Flyboy
 

Sidney Vianna

Post Responsibly
Leader
Admin
safety through quality

Without a question Quality and Safety can be co-managed. And it makes a lot of sense. Both have a risk component and need to be managed.

But just to make sure we understand your question: when you say safety, you are probably referring to occupational health and safety of your employees, not flight safety. Is this correct?
 

Miner

Forum Moderator
Leader
Admin
Flyboy said:
I am trying to get a broad view of how Quality and Safety can or cannot work together. I would appreciate all your comments (especially if any airline people are reading this) on the following.

Can quality and safety go hand in hand or can one restrict the other?
Shall I be pushing qulity - and safety will follow or vise versa?
If they should be kept separetly can one comlement the other and how?

Quality and Safety can go hand in hand. For example the two can share corrective action, internal audit and training systems among others. However, the two are still separate. If you push one, the other will not necessarily improve (or degrade). You will need to push both, but can share some of the same systems.

I don't know whether your subject line "Quality is Safety" expresses your or your companies beliefs, but you will find many people that will vehemently disagree. Quality is making your connection 100% of the time and finding your baggage on arrival. Quality is getting a truthful answer about when a flight will arrive/depart instead of 5 different lies from different airline reps. I could go on and on.

Read James Harrington's articles in October and November's Quality Digest about his airline experiences. Take a page from the Six Sigma process and determine the CTQs (Critical to Quality) for your customers. Use metrics that reflect what the customer experiences. For example, on-time departure means takeoff, not pulling away from the gate (and sitting 30 minutes on the tarmac). On-time arrival means when the door opens, not landing (and sitting 30 minutes waiting on a gate and missing your connection).

Survey customers and find out how many enjoy air travel. If the majority of your customers hate air travel, your quality is bad regardless what your metrics may tell you.
 
F

Flyboy

Thanks for the reply gents

The delema here is that safety is regulated by the regulatory aithorities. A reasonable degree of safety can be acheived just by complying with established regulations. In order though to maintain higher standards of safety we must introduce quality. You see where I am getting at? The two are inter related since in order to improve safety you have to improve quality and in order to have quality you have to improve safety
 

Jen Kirley

Quality and Auditing Expert
Leader
Admin
Flyboy said:
Dear friends

I have recently been nominated as Quality Manager of an airline. My experience in aviation is quite extensive but in Quality Management I have had little experience. I was very inerested to read a lot of your comments on various quality issues. I am trying to get a broad view of how Quality and Safety can or cannot work together. I would appreciate all your comments (especially if any airline people are reading this) on the following.

Can quality and safety go hand in hand or can one restrict the other?
Shall I be pushing qulity - and safety will follow or vise versa?
If they should be kept separetly can one comlement the other and how?

Thanks
Flyboy
Something I want to ask, however obtuse it may seem, is this: Safety for the internal customers, external customers or both?

External customers (passengers) is obvious; a desirable outcome and evidence of "goodness" or "fitness for use". Both are historic definitions of quality. In this respect, safety and quality are inextricably linked as passenger safety is surely on top of your list of success metrics.

Arguably the safety of internal customers (airline employees) is also a powerful contributor to your success. Onboard Navy vessels, before each section of steam piping was removed we would test a lagging sample for asbestos. Our workers' long term health, and the long term health of customer sailors was equally important as the ships' deployment schedule. The asbestos absence must be assured, or it must be removed according to procedure before the repairs could take place. Similarly we took great pains to ensure safe procedures were followed while repairs of other sensitive items took place, like oxygen valves on submarines. Long term results were given the same weight as short term results. Our results were excellent; ships usually sailed on time due to good planning, but also there was not much costly rework because of all that in-process care and accidents due to systems failure were few. I miss that devotion to excellence in my work...

Do you see what I mean? When your objectives include more than meeting schedules, but also a sparkling safety record, and comfort for your passengers, your airline can enjoy a good reputation as a quality service provider.

There is a good deal of human action in an airline's processes. Freedom from workplace illness among your employees, good housekeeping for industrial hygienic health and fewer injuries at work, good morale for maximum concentration and devotion to duty and other seemingly peripheral considerations will doubtlessly contribute to the main objective: planes consistently come down in as good condition as they went up.

I can think of very few industries where safety and quality would be less closely linked.
 

Al Rosen

Leader
Super Moderator
Miner said:
Read James Harrington's articles in October and November's Quality Digest about his airline experiences. Take a page from the Six Sigma process and determine the CTQs (Critical to Quality) for your customers. Use metrics that reflect what the customer experiences. For example, on-time departure means takeoff, not pulling away from the gate (and sitting 30 minutes on the tarmac). On-time arrival means when the door opens, not landing (and sitting 30 minutes waiting on a gate and missing your connection).
I thought they were good. Here are links for the October 2005 and November 2005 articles. Of course in a month, the November link will be useless and in three months both, will be broken.
 
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