To All Employees:

As you know, we commissioned an independent panel of safety experts this past spring to put our operations under a microscope. The panel began its on-site work April 10 and finished May 19. It was composed of 13 independent consultants and augmented with eight Alaska employees --- four pilots and four aircraft technicians.

The team recently completed its written analysis and forwarded it to John Kelly. We’re announcing the report’s findings to the news media today (Thursday). I write to give you a brief overview of the report.

One thing I really want to emphasize up front is that the panel found many positives here, chief among them being our highly dedicated and talented employees, and a strong foundation of safe operations. They also found a number of areas where we can make improvements.

The report covers four areas: Flight Operations, Hazardous Materials, Safety, and Maintenance & Engineering. And it contains more than 170 recommendations, all aimed at making Alaska Airlines a safer, and at the same time, more efficient operation. Just as we did with the FAA’s "white glove" audit, we are taking action on the internal assessment team’s recommendations. Many of these recommendations are already being implemented and we will continue to work hard to act on all of them as quickly as possible.

Some of this will be accomplished by changing existing policies, procedures or practices; others through new initiatives.

The team approached its assessment from a "best-practices-in-the-industry" standpoint, not the regulatory compliance viewpoint that is the purview of the FAA.

Their assessment focused on:

• Examining how our organization functions in regard to safety and how management oversees safety issues; and
  
• Evaluating Alaska Airlines’ internal safety policies, procedures and practices.

The team’s recommendations are directed at assisting us in building on existing strengths in shaping a strong culture of safety throughout the organization.

I think some comments from the team’s two leaders --- Jack Enders and Bill Hendricks --- may help describe where we are and where we need to go moving forward.

"Of all the airlines I’ve looked at over the last several years, I would say Alaska Airlines is one of the top airlines in overall terms of safety of operations," said Hendricks, who led the day-to-day work of the assessment team. "The true test of an airline is its ability to safely deliver its passengers from point A to point B. In our audit we looked at the processes behind how Alaska Airlines does this, we rode the airline, and it was our definite view that the airline was operating very effectively and very safely. We found no glaring safety deficiencies. They have all the programs and all the procedures in place, but the safety elements of the airline were too diffused. Several safety elements are now being centralized and this will do a lot to add to their safety culture.

"We found many areas in which Alaska Airlines exceeded standards, but of course that is not in our report," Hendricks concluded. "The litmus test for me is that I would get on their airplanes and I would put my family on any one of their airplanes."

Enders, the overall team leader, said that effective communication was the area most wanting at Alaska.

"If there is an Achilles heel in aviation overall, it’s communications," Enders said. "To be more specific, it’s really communicating what is meant by the regulatory and company requirements, communicating how those requirements will be met in practice, following up with audits to make sure compliance is met, and ensuring that the employees see a total commitment to safety by the senior management of the airline and its board of directors. Alaska Airlines ranks above the average of airlines I’ve seen worldwide in this commitment. They need to improve the way they communicate this commitment to the workforce and the supervisors."

Alaska Airlines is fully committed to excellence in everything we do. Excellence in safety is paramount to our success. We have not won the awards and recognition we have received over the years by being merely above average. My commitment to you and our customers is that we will make the improvements necessary to achieve a level of excellence in safety that will lead our industry.

The Report

The independent team’s report is divided into two areas: Flight Operations/Hazardous Materials/Security, and Maintenance & Engineering. Recommendations regarding the strengthening the airline’s safety culture span both of these areas. Again, more than 170 recommendations were made in these combined areas. Because of the number and complexity of the team’s recommendations, let me try to summarize them for you. Also, I think it’s important to note that the independent team’s findings closely track with the findings from the FAA’s recent "white glove" inspection of our operations.

Strengthening our Safety Culture

Recommendations on how to strengthen the company’s safety culture vary across each of the report areas. But there are common themes that revolve around communications, documentation and staffing. Among the team’s recommendations.

• Develop clearer lines of authority and responsibility.
  
• Increase staffing levels, from naming a Vice President of Safety to creating three new Managing Director positions in flight operations, as well as additional dispatch and maintenance & engineering personnel. In addition, the independent team recommended development of a formal succession planning program to ensure that key positions can be filled seamlessly from within.
  
• Enhance communications, both within and across organizational boundaries.
  
• Improve technology, from communications links to training equipment, state-of-the-art scheduling software and a centralized system for tracking safety data.
  
• Create several new committees and advisory groups to provide forums for employees to provide input on continually improving the company, including a Safety Committee, an Information Technology Advisory Board and an Implementation Committee to prioritize the report’s suggestions and ensure they are acted upon.
  
• Collect and evaluate more data to so that trends can be addressed before they become problems. To that end, the team also recommends implementation of a more robust system of internal audits.

Flight Operations/Hazardous Materials/Security

The assessment team suggested Alaska’s overall operational safety and efficiencies could be enhanced through greater standardization, especially in documentation and training, and a restructuring of the Flight Operations Training Department that touches on everything from the manuals in use to training equipment, new programs and record keeping. A complete review of the Flight Operations organization was accomplished with many specific recommendations.

Maintenance & Engineering

The Maintenance & Engineering portion of the report covers Maintenance & Administrative Management, Maintenance Programs, Maintenance Quality Assurance and Engineering Programs Management.

Among the 70 recommendations made specifically for Maintenance & Engineering are:

• Manuals & Procedures: Most of the report’s recommendations relate to the manuals and documents that guide the division’s work. The majority of the recommendations are aimed at clarifying existing procedures, preparing new procedures that reflect current work practices, bringing greater consistency to the work performed and reducing the need for interpretation of policies and procedures. Most importantly, perhaps, is their recommendation that there be an expedited review of the General Maintenance Manual to turn it into, in partnership with the FAA, a General Procedures Manual (GPM) and the establishment of the GPM as an Air Transportation Oversight System (ATOS) qualified manual system.
  
• Training: Recommendations cover a variety of training initiatives that will strengthen existing programs; provide for better communication and coordination between departments within M &E as well as other departments; provide for better record keeping of all training activities; and generally to provide more consistent procedures for all M & E activities and a reduction of interpretations of those activities and procedures.
  
• Facilities & Equipment: The addition of staff will dictate changes in the division’s facilities and equipment needs. The team has recommended a revised space plan to accommodate these changes and has made recommendations for automated systems to assist with the timeliness and accuracy of a number of tasks.

Implementation

Of critical importance now is what we do with the recommendations contained in the audit team’s report. I can tell you that implementation of these recommendations began weeks ago. In the Flight Operations area for example, Kevin Finan’s implementation teams have already made significant progress in adopting the report’s recommendations, including the comprehensive reorganization of the division. In Maintenance & Engineering revisions to the General Maintenance Manual have already been made, many of the staffing recommendations have already been adopted, and a more robust audit process has been implemented.

To ensure that we’re doing everything possible to improve, we have asked the independent panel to return to Alaska Airlines in six months to conduct an audit of our implementation effort.

We have six critical success factors, the first of which is safety. It must guide everything we do. We must have a strong safety culture if we are to continue to succeed. Responsibility for safety begins with me and John Kelly. It must run through every procedure, every process and every action we take.

I hope you will join me in fully embracing the work and recommendations of this exceptional team so we can continue to build on the safety foundation we have established.

A copy of the independent team’s executive summary and full report are available at the following links: 

Safety Team Executive Summary

Safety Team Full Report (PDF file is 245K and 74 pages in length)
 Download Adobe Acrobat Reader

Sincerely,

Bill Ayer