Aviation is a key industrial sector for global development. Safety is essential for its healthy growth. However its management is pervaded by simplistic methods based on risk matrices. We provide here a framework for risk management decisions in aviation safety at state level. This helps us in identifying the best portfolio that a state agency may implement to improve aviation safety in a country. We illustrate our proposal with a case study.

Introduction

Organizations involved in aviation have been dealing with the prevention of accidents from the early days of this industry. Since the first aviation accident with casualties in 1908, many efforts have been spent in improving safety in the sector. After its creation in 1945, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has focused interests in trying to make aviation the safest transportation mode. Statistics released by ICAO based on fatal accident rates support such efforts, with year 1968 marking a substantial improvement, see [1] for details. Since 2004, the accident rate has been relatively steady, with no significant improvement, averaging between 4 and 5 fatal accidents per 10 million flights. This could be due to the fact that aviation safety (AS) has reached a point in which safety benefits balance its costs, see [2] who consider that such point might have been reached in the late 1980s. However, an increasing deregulation and competition, as well as the expected increase in air traffic over the next decades, may put current safety levels into jeopardy. The total elimination of aviation accidents and serious incidents is a desirable goal, but clearly unachievable. The idea of risk-free systems has evolved in recent years towards a perspective centered around safety management, aimed at supporting resource allocation processes in which a balance between “production” and “protection” is attained. In this context, [3] defines safety as the state in which the risk of harm to persons or property damage is reduced to, and maintained at or below, an acceptable level through a continuing process of hazard identification and risk management. AS management is articulated according to different levels and affects both the aviation service providers (airlines, airport operators,. . . ) and the regulators of aeronautical services. This point of view is supported by ICAO through the regulatory framework of Safety Management Systems (SMS). In this regard, it is worth noting that one of the most widespread methods for risk management in AS is based on risk matrices. A risk matrix is a tool for risk assessment and management that graphically represents the severity and likelihood of different risk factors [4], in our case called AS occurrences. Indeed, the most important regulatory organizations, such as ICAO, EASA, FAA or Eurocontrol, support and promote their use in all aviation sub-sectors, from airports to air traffic control, going through air navigation. Frequently, discrete scales of severity and probability values are used, whereby a table with cells associated with discrete levels in both magnitudes is defined, see [5].