Safety culture evaluation in China Airlines: A preliminary study

Recently, the global aviation industry has started to promote Safety Management System (SMS), and thus consider the enhancement of safety culture as an essential. To meet the growing demand of safety culture assessment, we cooperated with China Airlines (CAL) in Taiwan to develop a safety culture questionnaire using both qualitative and quantitative methods to meet the needs of their operation environment and to take the theoretical researches of safety culture into account. During the development process, we continuously integrated the opinions from the industry experts, and effectively established a safety culture assessment tool that not only conforms to the actual operation of the airline but also to the requirement of reliability and validity. Although the statistical results show both the strengths and weaknesses of CAL's safety culture, the hidden reasons of the shortcomings or unstated ideas of workers are still remained undiscovered in this phase. In the following, we would use the focus group method to help examining the potential causes of those low score facets of safety culture, and to develop follow-up recommendations to improve CAL's safety performance accordingly.