Read our series of interviews with the people who are making the Yocova platform come alive. First up, David Mawdsley, aviation industry veteran and safety champion, who is a driving force behind Yocova’s safety focus areas.
As a young engineer serving in the RAF, David was first to the scene of an accident involving a large transport aircraft. The flight deck had exploded, the crew lost their lives, the aircraft was destroyed. This incident was a defining moment for David, as a personal tragedy but also as a lasting influence on his long career in aviation safety.
David is a Chartered Engineer, Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society, and a member of the Flight Safety Foundation International Advisory Committee. He is a graduate of the Accident Investigation Course at the University of Southern California and lectured for a number of years on Safety Management (SMS) at Cranfield University, a course he helped to design.
He retired from the RAF in the rank of Wing Commander, his final appointment being Engineering Inspector of Flight Safety for the whole of the RAF. He went on to be Head of Corporate Safety for Cathay Pacific Airways in Hong Kong, and later rose to become IATA’s Director of Safety based in Montreal.
< David on the steps of ICAO, the UN organisation based in Montreal, where he spent 6 years lobbying for improvements in aviation safety. On behalf of the Industry Safety Strategy Group – a collaborative venture involving Airbus, Boeing, ACI, IFALPA, CANSO, FSF, and IATA – he presented the Global Aviation Safety Roadmap to ICAO. He has since played a leading role with the Roadmap’s implementation in various parts of the world.
At IATA Montreal David launched the Safety Trend Evaluation, Analysis and Data Exchange System known as STEADES and a Flight Data Monitoring capability for medium and small airlines. These “normal” operations monitoring programmes have subsequently transformed safety risk management and flight crew training across the whole civil aviation sector.
Most significantly from his IATA vantage point, David took a leading role in creating the Global Aviation Safety Roadmap, which to this day is a fundamental component of the Global Plan for Aviation Safety published by International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO).
As an Aviation Safety Advisor in Safety Management Systems and associated software, David worked with Rolls-Royce R2 Data Labs advising at the design level. There he was nominated for a Rolls-Royce award as member of a team working on a Digital ALARP (As Low as Reasonably Practical) tool. Comfortable conceiving at a creative level, David has played a key role in the evolution of early Yocova community collaboration initiatives and special interest groups, where he continues to act as a moderator.
We asked this practitioner in aviation safety to tell us more about the strengths and opportunities he sees developing within the Yocova platform, and what he considers the key future market challenges in aviation safety.
What value does Yocova bring to the aviation industry?
“Yocova is genuinely seeking to promote collaboration among so many safety, operations and airworthiness practitioners in a wide range of extraordinary organisations. It removes impediments to communication and collaboration, as it brings people together digitally on a regular and consistent basis.
The level of continuous access and open dialogue between people, who are often scattered around the world, is made simple by secure technology, ease of access and industry focus. It brings vendors and airline companies together to spark connections in an environment that makes collaboration and innovation more viable.
Yocova bridges the gap created by the inability to meet in person, and maintains lines of communication to facilitate contact. Compared to the high costs of an in-person conference or seminar, or faced with barriers to travel due to Covid-19, it’s possible to continue to collaborate online with the secure dissemination of industry information.
While conversations and collaborations can be held both within and across the groups between individuals on the platform, the higher-level capability of data rooms is an additional attraction. Data can be shared with confidence in the knowledge it will remain secure, allowing confidential sharing of in-depth data to facilitate deeper discussion and collaboration within and between companies.
And the Marketplace on Yocova takes the chance aspect out of meeting someone at a seminar or a conference on an ad-hoc basis. It’s outstanding for vendors to have this continual access to customers – to be able to show their new products, offer trials and make connections is a much more focused and effective way to do business.
Lots of other websites or forums try to serve this purpose, but Yocova promises something different. The Yocova platform enables effective collaboration, and then also meets the big challenge of taking collaboration through innovation to implementation of ideas.”
What are some of the changes you are seeing sparked by collaboration on Yocova?
“A real benefit of the collaboration I’m seeing on Yocova is the sharing of knowledge and industry intelligence that is moving the industry forward, enabling groups to target more precisely those aspects which have the potential to achieve greater proactivity and even predictivity in accident and serious incident prevention.
I’m involved in multiple groups on Yocova, and have found a common sense of purpose and commitment in the groups to creating change for good in a number of critical areas. There is a big focus on the threats and also the opportunities thrown up by the Covid-19 crisis. The Covid-19 group I run is closely aligned with the planned and predictable recovery groups that are working on creating an industry recovery playbook, with positive ways the industry might come back stronger.
Groups on evidence and competency-based training, safety performance indicators and SMS data sharing are yielding meaningful discussions. And in the hazard risk management group we are focused on ways to manage risk at the practitioner level, to keep the discussions relevant.
The real joy of the platform is when unexpected opportunities arise. In the hazard risk-management group we’ve worked hard to identify a hazard priorities list, so far generated manually from the various data sets that are out there in the industry. The search for the holy grail here, however, is concerned with identifying and mitigating in a timely way the specific hazards, threats and risks operators face. Why not provide a risk index for the mission?
The power of having access to this data is huge – before a pilot goes to fly, they can be alerted to threats in a multi-disciplinary way in the exact region they are about to fly in. Moving to be more proactive about hazards and risks, and being able to communicate threats in such an immediate way is a massive step forward.
Typically, you might expect developments in this area to come from deep within the industry itself, such as the manufacturers. With group collaboration, a vendor who has expertise in the risk management aspects of operational security at the front line, for example, has come up with the ability to use big data to automatically generate a hazards list of the kind we are forming in the HRM (hazard risk management) Group – which is a step towards so called predictive risk.
And this is the serendipity of bringing people together that otherwise wouldn’t have been close contacts – it makes for exciting innovation, with the potential of such advances in this risk-based approach to prevent any and every accident.”
What do you see as the future market challenges in aviation safety?
“There are many challenges in the form of hazards, risks and threats ahead for the aerospace industry. In the forefront of everyone’s minds there is of course Covid-19, where we as an aviation community are playing our part already on Yocova to make a difference; working towards our industry recovery playbook and discussing new issues as they keep arriving with alarming speed.
In the safety risk management space, we’re also collaborating and seeing the green shoots of innovation. This involves disruptive technology, digitisation, remote working, cybersecurity, drones, climate change emergency, and so on – for which effective risk management should be of great value if not made overly complex or voluminous for those expected to apply it in practice.
These threats, hazards and risks are also opportunities. Safety risk management is widely used to identify what went wrong. However, more recently, and in the remit of Learning from all Operations and so-called Safety II thinking, it is wisely beginning to be used to identify what went right to build SMS on success!
From there we can identify opportunities which lead to the tools for more effective decision-making, or even make a better decision on which risk to take. This space is not only about safety. It is multidisciplinary in nature spanning security, airworthiness, ATC, airports, OEMs, MROs, even business risk and insurance.
Every hazard represents an opportunity for a solution. With Yocova as the perfect listening tool, collaboration and innovation platform for our times, we are placed very firmly as the springboard to future success in many areas of the aviation industry.”
David concludes: “I would encourage all individuals, aviation enterprises, and digital data vendors to step on board Yocova, to enjoy collaboration with industry peers and experts, as well as benefit from a single, scalable global platform a to market, sell and manage digital solutions.”
For more information, to contact or collaborate, you can contact David on Yocova via his personal profile, where you can also read his latest article, Disrupters Driving Change in Aviation Safety Data.
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