February 2011 - Indian Airforce

other commands, the flight safety officer couldprovide some insights into the possible causes andmeasures adopted towards ensuring safe flying inthe station. I have seen some Commanders askingthe youngsters the relevance / learning value forthem from the incidents occurring at anotherstation. If not done, they merely become a drabaffair. Although this will require extra effort onthe part of safety section but I personally feel thatthis will pay off in the long run as far as flight safetyis concerned.Station flight safety activities beyond theroutine. There is no doubt that the flight safetypersonnel at a station are engaged in a lot ofactivities and any suggestion for out of the routineactivities will meet with a lot of resistance. Of theroutine activities that are conducted at a stationand those that consume a lot of manhours arethe ‘cleaning’ and ‘housekeeping’ activities andpreparation and display of posters. Occasionalposter competitions are held. Let’s say we havea quarterly quiz for personnel on the contentsof flight safety magazine with prizes thrown inas incentives. Such an activity will serve dualpurpose- firstly, enhance the awareness amongpeople about special flight safety features andsecondly increase the readership of flight safetymagazine which no doubt is a very educative tool/component of the entire flight safety programme.We could also have essaycompetitions, debates, a dedicated flightsafety week/ fortnight to observe flightsafety activities on a larger scale. Again,involve each section (which we do by theway of flight safety theme of the month),give each section some funds to designinnovative material with regard to flightsafety pertaining to that section. Andthen let their section outline/ discusswhat they did in the ensuing flight safetymeeting rather than just putting acrosswhat they did on a power point slide,which as it is does not register in a wholelot of cases. Let me give an example. Theflight safety theme for the month of April10 was ‘Medical Boards and Exams’. At ourSMC we sincerely put in efforts towards achievingsome of the key areas that were circulated fromCommand HQ. Beyond those, we carried out anaudit/ workflow analysis of our medical boards.We introduced an integrated investigation formfor patients with hypertension which replaced5 different forms. No big deal some may say!! Butwhen you have 100 odd cases of hypertension whoneed these forms quarterly/yearly, we will definitelysave time/ manhours both for the med/asst and thepatient. Even the small savings are cumulativelyhuge. After all, HDFC bank wants you to withdrawcash from ATM 40% faster and imagine the timesaved???Yet, when I put across the work done for themonth on a power point slide the whole meaning/implication of this achievement was lost. No onereally understood what we meant. May be if I hadexplained this, a whole lot of other officers wouldhave gone back to their workplace and tried toanalyse their work processes. After all, we do learnfrom each other. Similarly, if one of the engineeringsubsection came up with some innovative way ofhousekeeping/ cleanliness/ antiskid methods inthe hangers/ accounting of tools etc, these wouldhave implications across all sections and can beadopted once explained in detail rather than as asingle bullet point on a ‘busy’ slide.16 Aerospace Safety F e b r u a r y 2 0 11INDIAN AIR FORCE