Do you trust that you can report a safety occurrence, possibly triggered by an honest mistake, without suffering any disciplinary measures from management? Do you trust that such a report will not ultimately backfire to you with a criminal investigation being launched at some stage as a result of an unexpected sequence of developments?

Congratulations, if you do! You are one of the few who doesn’t lack trust. Trust seems to be an ever shrinking component in the aviation industry nowadays. At the same time, trust remains a key ingredient for a strong Just Culture environment and a substantial prerequisite for establishing a robust safety reporting culture among aviation professionals. This was the leitmotif that emerged at the Just Culture conference, which gathered almost 300 aviation stakeholders in Brussels on 1 Oct.

The conference was organised in the context of the new Occurrence Reporting Regulation (376/2014), which becomes applicable across Europe on 15 Nov. On this occasion, 16 aviation stakeholder groups, including European pilots, airlines associations, airport representatives and the European Commission pledged to work towards creating an environment, which will encourage safety reporting [watch the video of official signature ceremony of the ‘European Corporate Just Culture Declaration’].

This has sometimes been a difficult situation for pilots, in which they often felt trapped in a “Damned if you do, doomed if you don’t”- situation. On the one hand, fear of apportioning blame and liability has hindered open reporting in some cases and airlines. Such was e.g. the case where 3 air traffic controllers were prosecuted in the Netherlands following a safety report. In the years after, the reporting number dropped by 50%! On the other hand, pilots know that only by providing such valuable information about safety incidents, others could learn from the past events and prevent future accidents and incidents.

This is why the broad consensus among industry that we need trust and a Just Culture lived and ‘breathed’ at all levels of an organisation paves a promising ground for the introduction of the new Occurrence Reporting Regulation. And also offers the heartening perspective that aviation safety professionals should no longer fear to be either damned, or doomed.