Harnessing inter-dependencies at an airport for safety - The safety stack approach

Even though safety culture is considered the cornerstone of an effective Safety Management System (SMS), few papers have focused on measuring and comparing safety culture within open systems such as the airport environment. This paper explores a collaborative safety culture approach on multiple organizations at one airport, using the “Safety Stack” approach. More specifically, a safety culture survey, developed by EUROCONTROL, was used to evaluate the perception of the company safety culture of employees working for fourteen organizations situated at one regional airport in the United Kingdom. The aim was to bring something new to the research community, by not only performing a number of safety culture surveys at one common location, but by using the results to define a preliminary roadmap of airport-wide safety culture issues for resolution and improvement. The results were overall positive for all the Safety Culture dimensions, suggesting that the airport has a reasonably strong safety culture. The organizations involved in the survey scored more homogenously on some dimensions, but had a wider spread of results for others. This lends an opportunity for the organizations concerned to learn from each other by sharing safety culture knowledge and practices through the Safety Stack approach.