Big miners to boost air safety
Four major Australian resource companies and the Flight Safety Foundation have developed and launched a unique new program to streamline the flight safety auditing of air operators contracted to transport resource industry workers and executives.
In Western Australia alone. Some 25,000 resource industry workers are transported by fly-in-fly-out (FIFO) contractors, and similar substantial operations are in place in Queensland, South Australia, the Northern Territory and the Bass Strait oil rigs. All these operations involve a range of chartered aeroplanes and helicopters, as well as dedicated airline aircraft on charter to the resource sector.
The modernised plan will take account of complex aviation issues directly affecting air safety, such as developing new safety standards, maintenance, aircraft automation, refuelling, pilot fatigue, the varying effectiveness of regulators between nations and all other identified flight safety issues.
The plan was developed after safety professionals from BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto jointly approached FSF last March to solve the spiralling problem of “over-auditing” by consultants representing various client companies but lacking shared and modern risk-management standards against which to audit.
Operators were also becoming frustrated at the frequency and diversity of audits against standards often developed by individual consultants, causing distractions which the operators believe can actually militate against good safety management.
BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Minerals & Metals Group (A Chinese-owned resource company) and PNG-based Lihir Gold will all now adopt an FSF-developed scheme which will mean that a single but exacting audit will satisfy the needs of all four companies, be more safety-effective, outcome-based, open and accessible while also delivering enhanced safety.
With the “critical mass” the four resource giants represent, many other similar companies are expected to follow suit.
Bill Voss, global president of the USA-headquartered FSF, travelled to Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane this week on a three-day visit for meetings with the Foundation’s Australian office, to cement the plan, which will be managed from FSF’s Melbourne office but rolled out globally wherever the companies operate.
Mr Voss – a former Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) official, is a certified air transport pilot, an airline mechanic, and an air traffic controller. He has overseen the development of major international aviation safety initiatives during his 30-year career.
The first step has been to develop an agreed set of standards which all participating charter and airline companies will need to meet before they can bid for flying contracts with participating companies. The standard is now referred to as the Foundation’s Basic Aviation Risk Standard (BARS) and endorsed by the Minerals Council of Australia who have recently adopted a broad resolution to support the program and encourage its members to embrace it. BARS was developed in consultation with resource company risk management experts, and is already in place and on the FSF web site.
Next came the development of an audit protocol based on the standard, and a training and accreditation program for auditors themselves, who will need to meet a specified benchmark to become an auditor accredited by the FSF’s program.
Then as an independent third party the Foundation will collect, de-identify, monitor and store data so that risk areas can be observed, studied and corrected.
Mr Voss says the standard will be a “live document” and the audit process will focus more on actively identifying, assessing and reacting to risk areas rather than “ticking boxes” as many conventional system-based audits do.
He says: “I’ve got to give credit to the way they structured this. It all began around identifying and mitigating risk areas as opposed to oral checklists of standards – such as counting the lifejackets aboard an airplane. An example might be if you’re working in extremely remote areas and you’re flying a fairly large aircraft, where the company would normally require traffic collision avoidance systems (TCAS). But you have only three aircraft operating in 1,000 square miles, and you know where they all are, which mitigates the TCAS issue. That’s the kind of large dose of common sense that was brought into these requirements.
“Another thing that’s quite significant in this program is that overall it is going to raise the industry standards pretty quickly, and not just for the operators who currently fly for the resources companies. At the moment if you’re an operator and you don’t have a contract with a resources company you can’t go and get yourself audited to their requirements. Potentially with this standard, if you’re starting up an operation and you want to qualify, you can pay for and commission an audit to the BAR standard and that makes you pre-qualified. So if something comes up at short notice you’re in a position to take that work.”
FSF’s Melbourne office has been expanded to cope with the new project. The Foundation’s Australian Regional Director Paul Fox says: “Australia has quite a good proactive regulator by comparison to countries like Africa, Indonesia and other parts of the world, so our system is fairly safe as a result. But one of the concerns is that because the resources companies are increasingly relying on aviation, there’s been a big increase in FIFO operations that have been going on and that’s likely to increase even more, which basically increases our potential risk.”
The document, Basic Aviation Risk Standard (BARS) [PDF 1.3M], is available to all firms, and may be downloaded here at no cost. It is not intended to supplant or alter national and international aviation operating regulations.
