The airport professional's source for airport industry news, articles, events, and careers.
Issue link: http://airportbusiness.epubxp.com/i/662557
FBO MANAGEMENT April 2016 airportbusiness 37 LEKTRO 1-800-535-8767 1-503-861-2288 sales@lektro.com Models Ranging 15,000 to 210,000 lbs. The Ultimate Aircraft Tug www. .com LEKTRO Easy to Use Simple to Maintain Electric Towbarless Rugged Universal Certified Since 1945 www.aviationpros.com/10017532 Note again, the standard does not indicate how many hours, shifts or otherwise employ- ees should or should not work consecutively. In FBO operations, long hours or overtime is too often a tattered badge of honor among line service technicians. For an FBO to create its own boundaries around employee fatigue is eminently reasonable. According to Mark Rosekind, former NTSB board member and now Administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, "Fatigue has been on the NTSB Most Wanted List of Transportation Safety Improvements since the list was first created in 1990." Using the above examples of the use of chocks, or fatigue management, the IS-BAH standard only requires an FBO to make the effort to create its own standards, distill them into written form, communicate them to its employee group, and internally audit compli- ance to its own standard. In short, it asks an FBO to be accountable to itself; to do what it says it is going to do, and document it. A great many well-run FBOs already do this, and should seek IS-BAH certification. CONFORMING TO IS-BAH Finally, conformance to the IS-BAH standard dictates that an SMS is incorporated into an FBO's operation. To be sure, SMS is often mis- understood as well in the industry. It is not a manual on a shelf, but a holistic approach to safety — a means to report and communicate hazards, near-misses, incidents and acci- dents — all with the goal of ana- lyzing and improving an operation. In doing so, FBOs and other busi- nesses who incorporate SMS move from being organizations that are reactionary, to those that are pro- active, to those that are ultimately predictive. Rarely will an FBO expe- rience the same accident twice, because there is a reaction to the first. It is the FBO with a mature SMS program that can predict an accident and prevent it in the first place. Said another way, the dif- ference between lucky and safe is an organization's cultural distance between being reactionary and predicative. Though still only two years old, IS-BAH is maturing and gaining traction. Recently, an FBO net- work of some 58 locations indi- cated they will be assisting their member FBOs interested in pur- suing IS-BAH certification. As one industry analyst observed about IS-BAH in general, rather than wait for a governmental body — be it national or international — foist burdensome rules upon the FBO industry, wouldn't it be easier to demonstrate through the voluntary adoption of an international best practice that there's no need for such rulemaking in the first place? With the exception of airport minimum standards, the FBO industry remains largely unregulated. The proactive adoption of IS-BAH may be the answer to continued long-term self-regulation for the FBO industry. Perhaps the most misunderstood nuance is that IS-BAH actually incorporates very few procedures an FBO or BAHA must adopt. Douglas Wilson is the president and founder of FBO Partners LLC, an aviaton consultng frm that provides asset management of hangar facilites for FBOs, and ofers specialized consultng in due diligence, contract life-cycle management and other FBO disciplines. Wilson can be reached at douglas.wilson@fopartners.com. Douglas Wilson President & Founder, FBO Partners LLC ABOUT THE AUTHOR Alec Maguire