Story ID: 035
Safety Standdown Addresses Integrity Impact on Safety
By: Matt Thurber
Caption: Integrity means more than just bolting on a safety program
Word Count: 1414
With a focus on “Integrity in Safety” at this year’s Bombardier Safety Standdown, Chris Lutat, managing partner at Convergent Performance, addressed what this means for the hundreds of Standdown attendees and online participants during his presentation, "Integrity in the Cockpit: Practical Applications of a Timeless Virtue.”
“Are you working on every part of your job?” he asked, connecting integrity with digging deeper into the work done to promote safety. “Are you putting…the appropriate amount of time and effort into, for example, fatigue risk management or have you just been…developing a fatigue risk management program? Are you bolting that onto your existing safety practices, enhancing your SMS, or are you genuinely working on every aspect of your job?”
Lutat is aware that pilots, maintainers, and managers face an overwhelming number of opportunities available for flight operations to enhance their safety programs as well as diversity issues, cross-generational personnel, workforce shortages, supply chain issues, technology changes, and more.
“The good news is that Standdown, for over a generation, has been addressing all of these things—whether it's fatigue, whether it's professionalism, whether it's airmanship, whether it's unusual attitude, training, maintenance training. There's dozens of resources on the Safety Standdown website that you can use beginning today.
“So where do you start?” he asked. “You have to put a little bit of time and effort into yourself before you can then put your safety behaviors and your safety knowledge [to work] and promote the safety, narrow or widen the safety margins at your flight department.” 
Having spent many years as a check airman designee, Lutat has been heavily involved in giving check rides to type-rating candidates. “Over two decades of watching literally thousands of our aviation colleagues demonstrate the craft, one particular thing has come through time and time and time again,” he said, “one particular behavior that could make all the difference in their approach, may add more meaning and dimension to their instruction, and add more meaning to how they debrief, how they train, how they get essential information into their learners.”
This boiled down to asking more questions, Lutat explained. “Why is it that we don't ask more questions? What prevents us, as aviation professionals, from really getting down into the weeds? What is it about us, as professionals, that prevents us from doing that?”
Lutat listed reasons why we might not ask questions when it could benefit us: exposing ourselves to criticism, opening ourselves up, the question might reflect negatively on ourselves, and not always knowing what to ask. “So asking questions is kind of tough.”
If we don’t ask questions, he went on, then “we don’t grow.” We end up losing opportunities to learn, for example, ignoring the benefits of debriefing after a flight and asking each other, “Got anything for me?” And the typical response is “No, it was a good flight, see you tomorrow.” 
What if the debriefing could have uncovered an important safety issue? “That one thing that we could have debriefed on…that gets undiscussed might be the thing that makes all the difference on the next leg together.”
The audience was shown a video of a segment from an episode of the Apple TV show Ted Lasso, where Ted wins a game of darts against Rupert, the slimy ex-husband of AFC Richmond football team owner Rebecca. The upshot of this episode is that Rupert lost the darts game because he didn’t think to question whether Ted, an American coach, actually knew how to play darts. In fact, Ted spent years playing darts with his father and handily won the game, humiliating Rupert. 
“We use that just to drive the point home on how important it is to be curious and to ask questions,” Lutat said, “and you can begin to do this right in your workspace.” 
He offered some ideas on how to ask questions. During a recent trip, a 10.5-hour flight from Milan to Memphis, he used one of the questioning tools that he had developed.
In this case, he explained to his first officer that he was going to talk to the dispatchers. And he asked the first officer, “Is there anything that you want me to ask them?"
“About 99 times out of 100, [that] results in zero response,” Lutat said. “But it sets a pattern of asking a question and getting an answer about something that matters to both of us. And [it shows] I really do value your input and it helps lower some of the barriers, especially when I'm flying as a senior captain with a brand-new hire. So I think that's a really good thing to do.”
Another twist in this technique is that Lutat might tell the first officer, “I’ve got dispatch on the line, here you go, ask them about that [storm] in the central Pacific and how that’s going to impact us and whether or not they think we need to add on some contingency fuel.
“That could be earth-shattering,” Lutat said. “If a captain hands the phone to the first officer for him to talk to dispatch about something really important...on the flight, there's all kinds of stuff rolled up into that mentorship-leadership—and again, setting this pattern of asking more questions. And number two, this is magic.”
The preflight briefing is another opportunity to ask the right questions, and in this case, Lutat will ask everyone to raise a threat that he didn’t discuss “and tell the rest of us how we're going to deal with that. The most important thing it does for me is uncover some blind spots that I wasn't aware of.”
Once ready to start engines, Lutat asks his crew if they are ready, giving them time to make sure that everything is set up for the flight, iPads are configured, phones are switched to airplane mode, etc. “All of those things that we need to do that I can't always see are happening on the other side of the cockpit just before engines start,” he explained. 
Before taxiing, he will ask the question again, and perhaps the ATIS changed and needs to be updated or something else needed a minute or two to check. Finally, he asks if the crew is ready before crossing the hold-short line onto the runway. “Ask more questions operationally,” he said. “This is what it looks like.”
Another question that Lutat said “is magic, particularly in an era where undesired aircraft states are something that is a thing and has been for 10 years and probably will be for a little while longer until we really slay this dragon: that question is, ‘How do things look to you?’
“It's amazing, but don't stop there. I tell him, ‘This is exactly what I want you to look at. I want you to look at our flight guidance setup. Do we have the right setup in the flight guidance panel? And I want you to look at our configuration. Don't just shoot me a thumbs up and don't just say it looks good. I want you to look across our flight guidance control panel. I want you to look down at our configuration. I want you to make sure that we've got everything set up just the way you would have it set up if it was you doing the takeoff.’
“And just before we start down on the glide path [there is] plenty of time to say. ‘How does it look to you? Do we have the right missed approach altitude set? Do we have the right FMS pages set? Do we have the right configuration? Have we gone to final flaps yet? How does it look to you?’
Keep asking more questions, Lutat concluded, and you get more engagement and integration, and with that comes more integrity. “And in this specific case, we're talking about the integrity of the flight path, the wholeness, the completeness, the safety, the integrity of the flight path of the airplane. It's compelling when you look at what you're doing now and what could be done better as modeled by some of the very best professionals in our industry.”