One of our previous witnesses, I think in part on the basis of statistics we've all been given, suggests that on the one hand the exposure is way up. There are more flights, more planes in the air, and so on. However, at the same time, the incidents being reported, the incidents per 100,000 hours of service, and so on, have been going down. The word they used was “complacency”. Have we dodged a bullet, or are in fact the mechanisms that we have in place adequate?
Having visited Mr. Berthold's city and looking at the aftermath of the rail accident there, and having heard many of the same things that we've heard here that we did in the rail study, particularly about the efficacy of the safety management system model, I want to open it up just for general comments quickly from each of you.
The idea is that a safety management system calls for a useful collaboration between the regulator, the operators, and the staff. Everybody pitches in and you get good results from that. You need trust and you need objectivity, particularly in the oversight, so that the regulator isn't just sitting there with the heavy hand of sanctions but is actually participating in upping the game. However, what we're hearing is that there are either some gaps in goodwill or confidence in this system.
To all three of you, does the safety management system actually represent something that we should build on, or do we need to be looking at something else?
Jerry, we'll start with you.