Business Aviation Safety Ethics

NBAA’s Safety Committee has identified ethics as a key part of professionalism, one of its Foundations for Safety. Personal integrity and character define ethical conduct – moral behavior that reflects truth and honesty in any endeavor related to our industry. To achieve the highest levels of safety performance, business aviation professionals must live by a moral code that doesn’t tolerate deceit, cheating or thievery.

An organization’s unethical behavior in an area unrelated to safety can also influence employee attitudes toward ethics in ways that can damage its safety program, so leaders must demonstrate integrity in every aspect of their business to ensure the highest standards of safety performance. Maintaining and assessing individual or organizational integrity can be challenging, given pressures that exist to meet performance goals or budget targets, even without the undue influences of greed, coercion or malice. However, organizations and their leaders can earn the trust of their employees, executives and regulators by demonstrating a clear ethical compass over time.

In our industry, this trust is essential, as almost all aviation work is founded on self-policing. Did the crew comply with stabilized approach criteria? Did the mechanic perform every step of the inspection? Did the scheduler/dispatcher choose the handler/fuel supplier based on the company’s policies? In each case, the organization has placed its trust in its employees to do the right thing.

Organizations and their leaders are, however, not the only actors in determining whether others trust them. We have all heard the phrase “guilt by association,” reinforcing that it is up to individual decision makers to determine the organizations and individuals with whom they associate. An organization concerned with its own ethics will choose to associate itself with those individuals and organizations that share the same values. They will seek out information on new vendors or customers from any available source and remain vigilant against deals “too good to be true,” vendors unwilling to provide good-faith estimates or warranties, and customers that ask them to bend the rules.

The individuals that maintain your safety culture, i.e. your employees, are watching how your organization and its leaders make decisions and will, for the most part, apply the same standard to their own actions in making their safety decisions, or leave if the organization’s standards do not measure up to their own. In the long run, the ethics demonstrated by an organization are essential to determining its safety culture, which, in turn, will directly affect the safety of its aviation operations.