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Chairman Deborah A.P. Hersman |
I want to thank my fellow Board members and all who joined us for this important Board meeting.
Today we have talked a lot about professionalism in the cockpit, in the cabin, in the control tower, and in two weeks, on May 18th, we will commence a three-day forum focusing on Professionalism in Aviation. The forum is intended to raise public awareness of industry best practices and to promote an open discussion between the Safety Board and invited panelists on the importance of developing and ensuring excellence in pilot and air traffic controller performance.
Panelists will be drawn from industry, government agencies, labor, academia, and professional associations, and we will explore a variety of topics. I believe that forums, like this one, are important exercises that create additional opportunities to improve the safety of our aviation system, and I invite you to join us.
As we close out our deliberations today, I am grateful for the outstanding work of the NTSB staff, who worked tirelessly to investigate this accident, hold an excellent public hearing last June, and complete a thorough report, while complying with international protocols in just over 15 months.
I believe the safety recommendations that have come out of this investigation have an extraordinary origin -; a very serious accident in which everyone survived. Even in an accident where everyone survives, there are lessons learned and areas that could use improvement. Our report today takes these lessons learned so that, if our recommendations are implemented, every passenger and crewmember may have the opportunity to benefit from advances in safety.
Our work today reminds me of what every good sports team does after a win. Instead of celebrating their victory, they go back and watch film. They analyze both the areas where they succeeded and the areas where they can improve for the next game. They make constant adjustments, and the better the team gets, the smaller the adjustments are.
The aviation industry is a very good team. Over the past several decades, air transportation has become exceptionally safe. That's a credit to the men and women on flight 1549 who had flown for decades in anonymity, as well as hundreds of thousands of others who build and maintain planes, direct air traffic and perform countless other jobs that all contribute to air safety day in and day out.
As the aviation industry continues to improve its safety performance, the NTSB will continue to dig deeper. Just as airlines are always evolving, and industry is constantly deploying technology to improve safety, we will conduct more sophisticated investigations. In that regard, I view the recommendations we agreed upon today as a model for the next generation of accident investigations -; at the same time we acknowledge that the system worked, we are able to identify ways it can be improved.
So, even as we celebrate all that went right last January, we must look forward. The next time a flight is ditched, the conditions may not be as favorable as they were for Flight 1549. Our hope is that if heeded, the more than 30 recommendations that the Board approved today will help another crew and plane full of passengers, so that perhaps the next airline ditching will be known not as a tragedy, but as another miracle.
