Safety and security - our safety measures

Our Safety Management System

We have a British Airways Safety Management System that ensures that our safety performance is monitored and maintained through an ongoing process of audit, assessment and risk management. It aims to make continuous improvement to the overall level of safety of our passengers and staff.

The Safety Management System defines the lines of safety accountability throughout British Airways. It includes the direct accountability for safety on the part of senior management and the leadership team.

Our reporting culture has been developed over a number of years and is considered to be one of the best in the world. The culture is open and honest and allows us to capture data that can be actively assessed to develop effective prevention strategies.

Corporate safety and quality team

We have adopted a structured approach to managing safety that is led by a Corporate Safety and Quality team. This team sits as an independent group to ensure an overview of safety in regard of all our activities:

• companywide implementation of quality assurance
• risk management
• health and safety
• management of safety data
• safety reviews
• audits
• safety investigations
• departmental and company safety review boards

Continuous improvement approach to safety

Flight Operations Safety Programme

We have a continuous improvement approach to safety. This is demonstrated through a safety training programme launched in October 2007 involving all of our pilot community. This is a further development of previous initiatives.

Ramp Safe Programme

Significant investment has been made through our Ramp Safe Programme, which was introduced in 2005. The programme focuses on continuously improving staff behaviour on the ramp to improve safety:

• ensuring staff wear personal protective equipment such as ear defenders
• raising awareness of removing foreign objects from the ramp

The programme is helping to reduce lost-time injuries to staff and damage to aircraft and equipment.

The British Airways Safety Plan

We review core industry risks and review them against British Airways' policies and procedures. This ensures we mitigate appropriately against potential risks on a continual basis.

Leadership and driving industry change

We are actively engaged in improving safety on an international level:

• our Head of Safety and Security is a member and ex-chair of the IATA Operations Policy Committee
• our General Manager of Corporate Safety is the Vice Chair of the IATA Safety Group and Chair of the IATA Incident Review Meeting, where lessons are shared to ensure wider learning from safety incidents
• we set up a European Safety Group with Air France, Lufthansa, Iberia, Swiss and KLM, to maximise the influence on safety improvements

British Airways Safety Information System

British Airways developed BASIS (British Airways Safety Information System) which was the first safety management system to record all safety related data. BASIS was subsequently adopted by a number of other airlines and formed the building blocks for today's eBASIS (an electronic version of the system).

Our employees and management team can access this system anywhere in the world. The initiative significantly enhanced the safety of the industry and we were the first airline to introduce it across our entire fleet.

Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning Systems

• We were the first airline to install Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning Systems to our aircraft.

We have led a number of safety initiatives including influencing changes to Traffic Collision Avoidance System alert calls, lobbying international support for these initiatives through our participation in a variety of safety groups.