HAI’s Director of Safety Chris Hill talks to the ACSF’s President, Bryan Burns, about the ACSF’s Aviation Safety Action Program (ASAP) for helicopter operators.
The following video was filmed in March, 2022 at the HELI-EXPO 2022 in Dallas, Texas.
Below is a modified transcript of the video:
Chris Hill: Hi, I’m Chris Hill, the Director of Safety at Helicopter Association International. I’m joined here today by Bryan Burns, President of the Air Charter Safety Foundation, here at HELI-Expo 2022 in Dallas, Texas. And we’re going to talk about ACSF’s programs and partnership with HAI in the SMS (safety management system) program.
The Air Charter Safety Foundation has grabbed one of the first opportunities to join with a company and we’re going to talk a little bit about that. But first, I want to get with you, Bryan, and talk about this partnership that we’ve got going now. What’s the plan for the future on this?
Bryan Burns: Well, Chris, first of all thank you for inviting me to this event. It’s spectacular. First time attendee here and I’m truly overwhelmed with the activity that you got going on here so thank you for letting me participate.
We formed this partnership with HAI because we felt first of all the rotorcraft world—when we were first reviewing what is the need of the market—and we found that the small to medium size operators were the target audience that we wanted to get involved in the SMS program.
It’s a challenge because we found that most small operators do not have the time the money and the resources to really invest into the SMS program so we decided that to offer a low-cost, customizable scalable program that we could introduce to the rotor folks and I think as we kind of move down this journey we’ve shown minimum we’ve got at least 6-8 companies that are already participating. And we several that we’re going to be meeting with while we’re here to see if we can get them past the goal line and into our SMS program.
So we’re looking forward to it.
Chris: Great. Thanks, Bryan, so part of this experience here is people come in and they’re curious about SMS like you said they’re small operators but then once they’re in the program they start talking with you. And you also have other options for them to get into to explore and discover—one of them being the Aviation Safety Action (ASAP) program.
My understanding is that it’s a pretty good add-on to just a normal SMS and that’s something you like to talk about from your perspective.
Bryan: Absolutely. What we feel the ASAP program offers is that it complements the safety management system. Because SMS is the foundation for it all. It literally has the basis for what you need to mitigate and manage risk.
The next phase is that is what we feel is the ASAP program, which is a voluntary safety reporting with immunity from the FAA. So that’s the beauty of the people that are in your company to give full disclosure and transparency to events that are happening that may not necessarily be disclosed.
The ASAP program has been a huge success. We’ve got over 200 operators now participating. We’ve got a half a dozen now in the rotorcraft world that has reached out to us. I see nothing but value in adding to that in your SMS toolkit and how it they complement each other.
Chris: Perfect. Bryan, thanks a lot thanks for being here. We’re really looking forward to some great things with this partnership in SMS and ASAP.
Bryan: Well, thank you for partnering with us all.
