Join the BeCA Air Safety Committee!

Over the last couple of years, we have seen plenty of regulatory changes (licensing, EASA OPS, Safety Management Systems (SMS), Just Culture, etc.). And there is more to come: new Flight Time Limitations (FTL), Fatigue Risk Management (FRM) and new rules on aviation occurrence reporting.

EASA is now moving towards performance-based regulations and oversight. This means that national aviation authorities (such as our BCAA) will no longer perform periodical audits of airlines to see if a company complies with current operational and safety standards, but instead will rely on data, gathered and provided by the airlines themselves.

The airline industry is not the first to move towards performance-based regulations. The nuclear sector did (and ended up with Fukushima), the oil and gas industry did (and caused the BP Deep Water Horizon accident), the financial world did (and plunged the Western world in the 2008 credit crisis). Will our industry learn from these mistakes?

The only way to ensure it will, is to develop an active and structured pilot participation. As a primary stakeholder in safety, we need to raise our voice when we see potential safety issues. It is our duty to ourselves, our colleagues and our passengers.

For over a year, a new wind has been blowing through the BeCA Air safety Committee. We have a new team, which has collected a mass of knowledge and experience on these new safety regulations. So far, we have had meetings at political level, with the BCAA and with the Belgian Accident Investigation Board (AAIU). But this is not enough. We now need to spread the word. Because these new regulations on Just Safety Culture (JSC) and Safety Management Systems (SMS) will affect all of us, it is essential that we – as airline pilots – understand them and actively take part in their implementation.

To that aim, the BeCA Air Safety Committee (ASC) calls on you to help us achieve this goal. Don’t worry, you won’t have to attend numerous meetings. We already have online tools in place to work as efficiently as possible. So, if you are interested in getting involved, just send us a quick email.

As a first step, we will:

• setup a mailing list including all interested BeCA members.
• provide you with a basic JSC training (online or in-person).
• share among those members any questions / issues / documents / advice on JSC topics.
• support those members in fulfilling their role as an ambassador of JSC principles.
• organise ad hoc meetings – when deemed necessary.

We look forward to meeting you. In the meantime, we wish you many happy and safe landings,