Aircraft safety: Our role is to imagine the most extreme scenarios

Florence Le Marchand is in charge of safety enhancement at Airbus. What makes her tick?

Florence, can you summarise your career? 

After graduating from engineering school with a Master's degree in aeronautical mechanics, I started as a subcontractor installing systems on the A400M. I then worked on the development of the newly launched A350 programme to ensure that the design met operator expectations. 

After joining Airbus, I spent 15 years in Customer Support Engineering in the Cabin & Cargo and Flight Controls departments. I was already directly involved in safety, helping to identify and investigate in-service aircraft events to better understand their impact. In this role, I joined the Airbus “Go Team”, a team of experts who act as advisors to the Accident Investigation Authorities to collect technical evidence at the accident site. That was when I met the investigators from the Airbus Safety team.

Your career path seems to have led you naturally to your current job ...

Yes, it was a gradual and smooth process. However, I chose to join Safety Enhancement rather than Investigations. That's largely because Safety Enhancement is more about analysing events and 'weak signals' to launch preventive actions of a different nature from design evolution, information sharing or the development of new safety enhancement features. 

Investigators, with whom I work closely, are tasked to investigate and understand accidents and serious incidents in order to prevent recurrence and to propose lessons learned for safety improvement. They also look at the recommendations made by investigation boards. Our work is interlinked. The information they gather and their suggestions feed into Safety Enhancement's thinking and projects.

What do you like best about your job?

I particularly enjoy being able to work on the whole aircraft design, procedures and maintenance, not just on one particular system, but on every programme, including the A220. Our aim is to continually improve the safety of the aircraft we fly and, where appropriate, to develop new safety enhancements with a “safety beyond standard” approach.

Don't all Airbus aircraft already meet the highest safety standards?

All Airbus programmes not only meet certification requirements, they exceed them. As I said earlier, we are always looking for new features to improve the safety of the entire Airbus fleet. I also like to find solutions that can be adapted to legacy aircraft. That can be more or less straightforward – that's what makes my job interesting!

Under normal circumstances, excluding accidents, how do you identify areas for improvement?

We get information from in-service events, from Airbus customer support, engineering and from our production lines. In addition to the continued airworthiness process, we have a weekly safety risk analysis with engineering, maintenance, operations and human performance specialists. Our role is to identify scenarios where additional safety barriers could help reduce or mitigate risks.

What happens if there's an accident?

In the unfortunate event of an Airbus accident, the ICAO Annex 13 activities are initiated by the investigation board and supported by Airbus accident investigators with a “never give up” mindset to understand the contributing factors of the accident in order to prevent a recurrence and to initiate preventive actions. 

Our prevention mindset is not limited to analysing and initiating proactive actions based on lessons learned and safety recommendations from an accident involving an Airbus aircraft, but also from events involving other manufacturers.

For example, recommendations following an accident involving another manufacturer led us to review and improve our management of radio altimeter data.

The number of serious accidents has been falling for several years. What does this mean for the business of aviation safety? 

Airbus aircraft operate 40,000 flights a day, carrying more than two billion passengers a year. And these numbers are growing. This motivates me to help make our aircraft, and the way they are operated, even safer. Today, the fatal accident rate for the latest generation of aircraft is at an all-time low. Beyond this positive figure, there is a natural risk of complacency. That is why our vision, our strategy and our daily activities are focused on doing everything we can to prevent accidents, in a quest to reach zero accidents.