Section 13 - Hazard Identification and Risk Management

To make your operation safer, you need to know what could cause injury or damage, how likely it is to happen, and how serious the result could be. The official terminology is “hazard identification” and “risk management”. Let’s start with some definitions.

A hazard is a condition with the potential of causing loss or injury.

A risk is the chance of a loss or injury, measured in terms of severity and probability.

For example, a wind of 15 knots blowing directly across the runway could be a hazard to a light aircraft operation. The risk associated with this hazard is that a pilot may not be able to control the aircraft during take-off or landing, resulting in an accident. You could probably think of several consequences of encountering this hazard, ranging from damage to equipment and reputation to injury and death. Another example of a hazard is an icy ramp. The risks include people slipping and falling, manoeuvring aircraft or vehicles not being able to stop, and possible FOD ⁵ if the ice is broken and loose. In a maintenance operation, an oxygen bottle stored near an oil cabinet or out of date maintenance manuals would be classified as hazards.

Your goal is to proactively identify the hazards in your operation, determine what risks are associated with these hazards and what the level of risk is for each scenario (We talk more about the risk assessment in the next section). Then you try to apply rules or design operating procedures that will reduce or eliminate the risks. This is known as a Corrective Action Plan. In rare cases you may decide that the risk is too great and that the best choice is to avoid the hazard by not engaging in a particular activity.

While we often think of hazards as being technical in nature, those that lead to accidents can be business-oriented - training, planning, budgeting, procedures and so forth. Here are some of the most hazardous times for an operation:

• When major changes are made to the organization
• Times of rapid growth
• When there is significant staff changeover
• When many employees are inexperienced
• When new procedures are introduced
• If financial problems start affecting operational decisions

Although you look for hazards constantly, you should especially look for them at high-risk times such as these listed above, and you might even plan a safety self-assessment, if these conditions exist.

This is the proactive part of safety management. You are looking for problems before they become incidents or accidents. OSH statistics suggest that for every serious or disabling injury in an organization there are upward of 600 previous safety deficiencies and minor incidents that may or may not have been reported. In an aviation context this can mean that, at an organizational and industry level, an increasing number of incidents will increase the likelihood of an accident occurring.

Figure 3: Accident Ratio Pyramid - Frank Bird

If you can find ways to reduce the number of incidents at the bottom of the pyramid, you will reduce the number of accidents. Remember that many of those 600 incidents cost you money. “Hangar rash” incidents are one example and can be actively reduced by finding the underlying factors of the problem and changing the conditions under which people work to reduce the likelihood of them reoccurring. The savings to you can be significant.

⁵  Foreign Object Damage