THE EFFECTS ON LANGUAGE AND CURRICULUM OF FLIGHT SAFETY TRAINING USED IN HELICOPTER EMERGENCY MEDICAL SERVICE AFTER IMPLEMENTING A SAFETY MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

Abstract: The trend in contemporary aviation is to enhance safety by implementing a Safety Management System (SMS). This trend has also become a part of the medical rotary industry. As a part of a SMS, Flight Safety Training (FST) is included, which consist of Human factors, Crew Resource Management (CRM) -training and the creation/shaping of attitudes and safety culture. During 2012 a SMS was implemented in Scandinavian MediCopter Ab. This study attempts to discover if the implementation of the FST tool in the SMS has an effect on how professional aviators speak about safety and how the training curriculum is affected.

For the qualitative research nine professional pilots and flight instructors working with FST and duty in a Helicopter Emergency Medical Service (HEMS)-organization were interviewed about how they perceive the language and syllabus change during the last five years. Additionally the training curriculum was reviewed both before and after the implementation of the SMS. The results imply that language change is difficult to connect to implementing a SMS alone. The change can arguably be seen as being intertwined with deeper phenomena and is a result of a broader change, which does come incrementally. The study hints that as a part of such a change, the SMS helps people to have a more open and transparent approach to safety and increased incident/accident reporting. Changes in the curriculum could be found, which in part are also connected to other aspects, like authority and customer requirements. Additionally the results suggest that the SMS can contribute in making FST and reporting actually feel less bureaucratic, which is a phenomenon usually attributed to SMS.