Airline ground operations are subject to the conflicting demands of short turn-around times and safety requirements. They involve multiple parties, but are less regulated than airborne processes. Not surprisingly, more than a quarter of all aircraft incidents occur on the ground.

These incidents lead to aircraft damage and associated costs, risk of injuries, and can potentially impact in-flight safety. KLM Ground Services has targeted platform safety performance as an area for improvement. However, existing safety awareness programs have had limited effect. A direct link between safety culture surveys and safety performance has not been established, and therefore these are insufficient to give adequate feedback on interventions. Newly developed by the Texas University are the Line Operations Safety Assessments (LOSA), first targeted at cockpit operations. Variants are available since October 2010 for the platform and maintenance environments. The research group for Aviation Engineering at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences has used the original platform LOSA material and tailored these to the specific circumstances at KLM. Results to date show that with these modifications, platform LOSA is a useful tool to quantify safety performance and to generate trend data. The effect of safety interventions can now be monitored.


Referentie
de Boer, R.J., Koncak, B., Habekotté, R., & van Hilten, G.J. (2011), Introduction of ramp-LOSA at KLM Ground Services , Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, Leeds, United Kingdom