Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2016
When I was invited to deliver this paper it was suggested that I should adopt the title “Standards and Objectives for Air Safety”. I welcomed this idea because I think that now is an appropriate time to review our approach to air safety and I would like to discuss some of the modern developments in standards. On reflection, however, I felt that I should really make a small change to the title to put the objectives before the standards and I hope my hosts will forgive me for taking this liberty. I must confess that there have been many cases where the standards got written first and the objectives were worked out afterwards. But I would like to treat them here in the order in which I think they should appear.
I have been concerned for much of my working life with that part of safety called “airworthiness” but, as you probably know, it has been proposed that the ARB should now become part of a very much larger bureaucracy and so I hope my future colleagues will forgive me if I anticipate the merger with them and deal with safety in a rather broader sense.