Integration of risk and quality management is loved by some and hated by others. For most of us, it may be a matter of judgment whether and how much a system should or is able to be managed out of silos and of departmental boxes. Another part of life that different people loves or hates is flying. I love it.

LEARNING TO FLY
As a matter of fact, when most people go for their MBA, I spent a good deal of money learning to fly an aircraft. I don’t regret as the flying experience has taught me lessons I’d never come across in any other way, crowning with the first solo flight, a moment of decision when a mistake can literally cost your life. Well, I survived that morning on July 16, 1999 when I flew around this airfield: http://goo.gl/maps/cI3di and am here today to talk about the relationship between quality and risk as seen from the cockpit, defining the terms respectively as conformance to requirements and the effect of uncertain events on objectives.

Let’s go for quality of flight first. We all know from TV and comics that a pilot flies the aircraft holding the control lever or that funny sort of steering wheel, the yoke, right? Not really! Most of the time a pilot flies a plane by minutely adjusting two disks called trim wheels plus the power throttle. The trim wheels are connected to those small sections of the elevator and rudder, which are the horizontal and vertical planes of the tail and provide fine tuning of flight speed and direction. The throttle controls engine power and is responsible for adjusting altitude.

REQUIREMENTS
What the requirements are? At any moment, a pilot must respect two sets of constraints. One is given by the aircraft’s flying characteristics and except in very special circumstances are much beyond the current flight parameters. The other one is given by the flight plan as filled and changes made by flight control. For instance, one should be fly at 5,500 ft, heading 030 at an airspeed of 90 knots (about 100 mph or 160 km/h). Well, that means 5,500 ft, not 5,400 nor 5,600 because at those altitudes you may encounter a plane or chopper flying on the opposite direction! The same is valid for your heading because a five degree deviation will put you almost 8 miles off course at the end of one hour at 90 knots. Finally, there is speed that is crucial for navigation, or at least was before the GPS era. Anyway, the flight controller will not be happy to see you going up and down, left and right, ahead or behind schedule.

The maintenance of flight within those parameters can be seen as the quality of the flight and should be regularly though not constantly corrected for small deviations which may be cause by small local bursts of wind, temperature changes, the aircraft natural drifting tendencies, fuel motion in the wings and many others. Is it easy to see why the pilot does not use pedals nor yoke to control a steady flight. Flying is a matter of making incremental adjustments and waiting a few moments to see the results, very much like the way a manufacturing line is run: following the measurements and making this and that adjustment in screws, sensors and electrical sliders; or that was so before the microprocessor revolution, but it’s still like that in the services industry.

WHAT ABOUT RISK?
What about risk? Apart from the obvious threats like bad weather and mechanical breakdown, there are lots of menaces but also of opportunities that may have an impact on the flight’s objective of delivering crew, passengers and freight to destination safely and on time. For large planes the list is not significant since they are equipped and have plenty of ground support to face most emergencies. But for a small craft trivial things like passenger getting sick requiring an unplanned for stop, birds on the landing final stretch, worsening weather conditions requiring instrument flight, need to change course due to an emergency with another plane, navigation errors, animals on the runway and smoke from wildfires, to name a few, may cause delays and therefore impact the objectives. The same is true albeit in a lesses degree to opportunities of an earlier landing, like cancellation of a stop, a favorable wind, permission to fly directly to destination instead of following the established air route or to fly faster than originally planned. To those, the pilot responds by changing the whole parameters of flight, no longer using the tab wheels but the yoke and rudder until a new stable situation is obtained or the aircraft lands safely.

What strikes me in this comparison is that both quality and risk management have an influence not only on the flight but on each other. Keeping the plane within the prescribed course, speed and altitude allows a pilot to watch for threats to and opportunities for a safer and quicker flight. Avoiding natural risks and early preparing for taking opportunities of faster mission conclusion will make the flight less dependent on parametric adjustment, thus requiring less maneuvering and increasing crew and passenger comfort. And all and all, this is done by one single person or at most by two. On the cockpit, specially of a small craft, there is literally no room for silo management. Quality and risk are dealt by the same people. And the safety record of flight can only tell us that this is a winning strategy.

Bio:

J Armando Jeronymo has a B.Sc. in Electronics Engineering from Rio de Janeiro’s Ursuline University and a US Associate degree in Risk Management besides significant experience in the practice of insurance and reinsurance. Because quality systems certification began to appear when he was at college, he calls himself a member of the ISO9000 generation. Always been interested in quality and its management problems he has for the last couple of years deeply concerned with quality and risk integration. He is also interested in computer programming and an occasional writer on the subject. He is also a private pilot though grounded in the last years. He loves classical music and jazz (including Bossa Nova) and old movies. Married and father of a girl he is also an active member of his Rotary Club.