Overseeing and Monitoring Safety

How do investigators oversee safety and monitor risks? Monitoring the state of safety, and identifying where organisational safety is potentially degrading, is a primary objective of risk management and is one of the most fundamental aims of flight safety investigators. Monitoring and overseeing safety requires investigators to maintain a clear picture of the current state of safety across organisational activities and to notice and pick up on any early signs of emerging risks. This is challenging interpretive work that itself presents a range of risks and threats. If the early signs of risks are missed or misunderstood by investigators at this stage, then those risks are likely to remain hidden within organisational activities for some time — until they are realised in more serious, surprising and possibly harmful ways. Explaining the practical work of safety oversight therefore requires understanding how investigators view and address the interpretive challenges that they face, how they maintain up-to-date knowledge of organisational activities and risks, as well as how those risks come to be known about and identified in the first place. The previous chapters have examined how investigators understand organisational safety and analyse risk. This chapter takes a different angle and explores how investigators understand the risks and the challenges inherent to their own work of safety oversight and risk analysis.