News

22 Nov 2013

GOSS attends Manchester Airfield Safety Day

Arepo has attended our second airside safety event of the year, this time at Manchester Airport. The inaugural 'Manchester Airport Airfield Safety Day' was held at the Concorde Conference Centre and the focus of the event was to promote a 'Just Culture' of safety. 

Manchester Airport's Airfield Operations used the day to launch their Just Culture programme, Vision Zero, encouraging all airside workers to contribute to reducing safety-related incidents by taking personal responsibility for safety in everything they do. 

The day included presentations from key Airfield Operations staff from Manchester Airport, Directors from M.A.G, the co-chairs of CAA's GHOST (Ground Handling Operations Safety Team), Human Factors and NATS.

Critically the day encouraged aviation-related businesses to share their day-to-day experiences of promoting an open reporting culture to all ground service personnel, thereby improving safety in the airport operations workplace.

Giles Parry, Director of GOSS, who attended the Manchester Safety event says, "Recent feedback from the industry has indicated a relatively low percentage of reported incidents related to Ground Operations. Today really showed that airside operations could shift from a culture that apportions blame to one that encourages open reporting through a Just Culture. We've heard stories of open reporting from simple personal safety right through to larger scale near misses, and an open reporting culture is an example to us all. Taking those near miss experiences and learning from them can only benefit staff and businesses working in the airfield environment, both from a safety and cost point of view". Giles continues, "We're working with a number of our clients who already record near-miss information from their operations and are looking to improve how this can be reported to improve safety for the future".

More information about Arepo's Ground Operations Software System can be found at www.ground-ops.com.