On the treatment of risk/safety aspects within safety assessment of aviation

Abstract

Safety of aircraft is a hot topic due to the safety-critical nature of its operation and its significant negative impact it could pose to a larger society. In order to understand aviation safety in detail, it is important to understand how safety is considered at fundamental level historically and how it is incorporated in problem solving and decision-making process of recent times. In aviation, safety and risk are most often used interchangeably. Safety is used to represent overall condition of safety of the system of systems or the safe operation aspect of aircraft or aircraft as an integrated flightworthy system which needs to demonstrate safety in a regulatory point of view. Risk is the term used to represent or address extreme events having high impact potential which could possibly derail overall safety of aircraft or also Risk is a prospective concept whose careful implementation could help organizations to demonstrate and achieve safety in a longer period of time. This thesis was approached with a generic literature survey which includes a summarized view on the risk implementation in aviation. The thesis considers Safety Management System as a framework with which safety is incorporated in aircraft. The thesis investigates various aspects of importance in aviation safety management area. The overall question to be addressed is on how aspects of safety/risk is incorporated into aviation safety. The study revealed that the risk constructs are significant in aviation safety when it is applied through a standardized framework which is framed with the principle of safety at its core.