Safety Experts Stress Culture Drives Brand, Vitality

The 2026 Air Charter Safety Foundation Safety (ACSF) Summit spotlighted safety culture and how everyone is interconnected: What affects one organization’s brand affects everyone around them.

Robert Sumwalt, the former long-time NTSB chair and executive director of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Boeing Center for Aviation and Aerospace Safety, which co-hosted the event, welcomed attendees, praising how the summit has turned into a first-rate safety event, alongside ACSF’s other initiatives, such as the Aviation Safety Action Program, its Safety Management System tool, the Industry Audit Standard, and efforts surrounding flight data monitoring.

“You are collectively raising the bar on safety,” Sumwalt said. But he added, “I really worry about the people that are not here, and what are you going to do about that?” He asked if the audience would be good mentors if “the guy in the hangar next to you is running a loose operation.”

Conceding that it’s hard to do, he proposed, “We are our brother’s keeper because if there’s a crash involving a Part 91 airplane or Part 135 airplane or even a Part 121 airline, the entire industry gets painted with a broad brush.” He emphasized that the industry has a responsibility for mentorship to collectively raise the bar.

ACSF chairman and Flexjet chief safety officer Kent Stauffer also picked up on that theme and added that this comes down to safety culture. “Safety will live and die in your culture,” he said. “If you have the wrong culture, it will die.”

Stauffer pointed to the recent accident involving a Bombardier Challenger 650 in Bangor, Maine, and asked, “How many of you who operate Challengers immediately got calls from your owners going, ‘Am I going to crash too?’”

He further stressed, “There is no part of safety that’s proprietary. It’s not a competitive sport. If any one of us makes a mistake, all of us are going to feel it. Anything that happens in our collective industry—and even in the airlines—is a reflection of all of us. We must be aligned in the risk management, the processes and procedures, and the culture which we impart on all.”

Underscoring that point, Stauffer introduced Richard Meikle, executive v-p of safety at rival fractional operator NetJets, who will collaborate with him on safety issues. Meikle’s presentation centered on “A Living Culture,” and he stressed that an organization’s safety culture “really forms the foundation of your business in terms of viability and your brand. If you have a good, solid culture, you’re going to have a good brand; you’re going to have a good business viability.” However, an organization must also be aware of those cultures around them because a mistake by one could affect other brands.

OceanGate: A Study in Culture

Meikle gave examples of strong and questionable cultures across transportation modes. One such example involved the tragic implosion of the OceanGate Titan submersible on June 18, 2023, that killed all five aboard, including company founder Stockton Rush and Action Aviation chairman Hamish Harding. The Titan is believed to have imploded at about 11,000 feet below the surface as it was on an expedition to view the Titanic wreckage.

The U.S. Coast Guard Marine Board of Investigation called the accident preventable and cited inadequate design, certification, maintenance, and inspection processes for the Titan, along with a toxic workplace culture and inadequate regulatory framework. The investigatory board noted that the company culture enabled the CEO to “completely ignore vital inspections, data analyses, and preventative maintenance procedures, culminating in a catastrophic event.”

Meikle delved into the report, noting that this was the carbon-fiber submersible’s 88th dive. “It’s really intriguing that [this accident involved] the same hubris that actually resulted in the sinking of the Titanic with Captain [Edward] Smith saying, ‘Look, we’re going to go as fast as we can; don’t worry about the iceberg warnings.’”

OceanGate manuals specified that employees are required to comply with all safety rules and should actively participate in making the company safer, he pointed out. “That’s what they had on paper, but that is not even close to reality,” he said.

He noted the board’s finding of a toxic environment. “It was so toxic that it was based on termination of senior managers, the threat of looming termination when you would raise safety concerns, and the [board] described it as a critically flawed safety culture. They had glaring disparities between what was written on paper and what actually went on in the real world.”

Bleeding money, the company prioritized revenue over safety, he said. While it had 88 dives, only about a dozen had passengers on board. “It was so bad that in one particular point...they left the vessel outside over the winter.”

Kept in Maine with a thaw-freeze cycle, he said this would make the vessel vulnerable to expanding, driving some of its carbon fibers apart. At the same time, customer expectations could weigh in as they were paying a quarter of a million dollars for their experiences.

“Then of course, [there were] operational demands because they had a waiting list of people,” he said. “Ultimately, the culture here was usurping the mission director’s authority and responsibilities.”

The director of marine operations (DMO) was really concerned about the safety of the operation, Meikle said. In 2018, the DMO recorded a two-hour meeting held with the CEO in which he outlined “significant safety concerns” and asked for additional testing. Four days later, the DMO was fired. The termination letter said the company disagreed, but “given your qualifications, we are confident that you will find another position soon,” Meikle said, and noted, “Essentially, they’re acknowledging the fact that this guy’s an expert in the field…but because we don’t agree with you, because you said it's unsafe, you’re fired.”

At dive 80, a loud bang was heard, believed to be carbon fibers separating. The acoustic monitoring system picked it up, and it apparently frightened the passengers on board. An individual on a support ship raised concerns about the hull. The response, Meikle said, is that she was told the company was concerned about her “adventurous attitude.” That individual resigned. “Innovation was prioritized over safety,” Meikle added. As experienced people left, inexperienced people came in behind them.

The CEO was wedded to the design, but others had concerns. Partners such as the University of Washington and Boeing exited the project. “So, when you've got companies like that that are walking away, and you’re saying, ‘No, no, no,’ you should be asking yourself, ‘Why are we running forward now?’”

Meikle called the secrecy between the OceanGate departments “pretty fascinating.” The acrimony between the engineering and operations teams ran so deep that they were not sharing information. This made testing difficult. 

In addition, OceanGate avoided classing or registering the vessel under any country, thereby avoiding inspection. “Think through that one just a second. They deliberately didn’t register it somewhere to avoid any sort of inspections, and they didn’t class it, which is essentially the equivalent of an airworthiness certificate for a submarine.” According to the board report, the CEO was quoted as saying the company didn’t want that type of investigation. “That’s pretty shocking,” Meikle said.

And then, OceanGate had a seven-hour delay in activating the emergency response plan. “That speaks a little bit about culture because they’re sort of in that mode of don’t tell anybody outside the world here until we get a chance to try and hide this or fix it ourselves. And if you can fix it yourself, then nobody needs to know.”

In this event, the seven hours would not have changed the outcome. But, Meikle asked, “What if they were entangled in something? That seven hours might have made the difference.”

But he also noted that this culture didn’t happen overnight. “They didn’t start with, ‘You know what, we’re going to ignore everything,’” he said, calling this an example of organizational creep.

A Race and then the Snowball

OceanGate was just one of the events that Meikle highlighted. Another—and this puts a spotlight on the interconnectivity of the industry—involved an incident in which an a worker at an airport ran straight into a Gulfstream on an FBO ramp with a forklift. “We all rely on vendors an enormous amount to do our job,” he noted.

In the Gulfstream incident, the forklift operator said he couldn’t see the aircraft because the sun was in his eyes. But Meikle played security footage of the incident, which showed two forklifts that took off at the same time and went in parallel at the same speed, giving the appearance of a race. “I wonder what they might be doing,” he said, and added, “Interestingly, the forklift driver that hit the Gulfstream had been suspended by their employer the day prior for reckless behavior using a forklift.”

He said it was good that the FBO recognized reckless behavior, but not that he was allowed to return to driving the forklift, which “smacked” into the back of the Gulfstream’s wing and caused significant damage. Meikle asked: “Whose brand is affected by this, beyond the FBO’s? If you saw that airplane on the ramp, you’d think, ‘Oh my, somebody hit that.’ But what if the airplane was facing the other way? What if that damage was on the leading edge of the wing? How does that affect your brand?” In that case, people would assume the pilot ran into something.

Even so, he said, “The snowball effect happens here. The brand of the FBO is affected. Are the crew going to go back there? Probably not.” Further, the crew is going to talk about the incident when they are on the road, again further damaging the FBO brand. And it reflects on the operator.

“As we contract with vendors, we need to be thinking about what their safety culture looks like and how we hold them accountable as well.”

In another example of the snowball effect, Meikle pointed to a 2019 case of diesel exhaust fluid contamination in jet fuel that caused engine failures on two airplanes operated by the same air ambulance. Both aircraft landed safely, and lessons were learned at the FBO as a result.

But the incident brought press attention because in one case, a double-engine failure was involved—“lots of press.” Also, because of the double-engine failure, NTSB got involved, continuing to place attention on the incident. In 2020, the accident report was released, and the event popped back into the public eye. The same happened in 2023 when the FAA referenced it in a Safety Alert for Operators. For four years, this kept getting brought up. “If your brand was attached to that, now you’ve got to refresh on your brand damage.”

U.S. Navy Blueprint

All of this ties together, he said, promoting a “good, better, best” concept, always pushing higher without regulating oneself out of business. Meikle gave an example of this, pointing to the SubSafe program approach. The U.S. Navy developed SubSafe after the 1963 sinking of the USS Thresher.  This was the first nuclear submarine lost by the Navy and one of 16 lost in non-combat accidents, killing more than 500 personnel.

The Navy recertified submarines under the program, and “subsequent to that, they have not had a single loss of a submarine,” Meikle noted. “And SubSafe is a really cool concept. It is definitely worth reading about.”

Highlighting some of the program, he pointed to the emphasis on communication, ensuring that critical information is passed through redundant paths. Contractor technical specifications and recommendations are documented in writing, with a person signing off on that documentation. A signature requirement makes people pause and read carefully what they just signed, he noted, “because we’re now on the hook for what we’ve put on paper.”

Recurrent training folds in lessons learned from other events—whether from the U.S. Navy or from the Space Shuttle Challenger. The Navy uses cross-industry lessons for training and knowledge retention.

Retention is also critical in personnel. SubSafe requires overlap in positions before one person departs to ensure knowledge transfer. “In the civilian world, that’s harder to manage because we don’t control when people are going to decide they’re going to go somewhere else, but if you can keep mentoring people up, then you have reduced that risk,” he said.

Another aspect is the insistence on airing minority opinions. “This is a really powerful technique, and I challenge all of you to do this,” Meikle told the ACSF Safety Summit attendees. In meetings, he suggested, go around the room at the end and ask what their concerns are. Emphasize the importance of speaking up, he added, and “people will start to say things.”

Clear guidance rather than policies that leave things open to interpretation is another key. Meikle said this is especially important when waivers come into play. “Then, compliance is independently verified,” and contended that if OceanGate had followed SubSafe, perhaps the people on board would still be alive.

He cautioned against the weaponization of information, saying that it will discourage transparency and prevent information from driving upward through the management chain. Avoid language such as, “How did we let this happen?” he said. “If we don’t deal with the bigger picture, something else is going to get missed.”

In addition, he warned that clean audits do not mean a safe operation, calling that belief a misconception. “There are plenty of operators out there that have had audits that have been super clean, or they just finished an audit, and then they go out, and they have an accident,” he said. “An audit is a snapshot in time. It is not an inoculation.”

Further, he advised using an independent auditor and said that if an organization gets a bad audit, keep that auditor in the future. “You’ve got to suck it up and say, ‘We didn’t do well on that one. That’s okay.’ Bring them back next time.”

He noted that his company had one remarkably tough auditor years ago. Company executives still ask what the auditor would say as they evaluate their operations. “That’s how powerful an impact that had. It was really good.”

Ultimately, he said, “your culture and your vendors’ culture affect your brand. They affect your business viability. They’re really coupled.”