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Aerial Photography and Video > Risk assessments

heliraptor
Key Veteran
Location: Colchester, Essex, UK

Hi

Have any of you experience with a risk assessment.

I have a job I need to complete for the Ministry of Defence over the next few weeks and they have requested a risk assessment.

If you have please give me some pointers.

Cheers

Lee

06-27-2004 Over year old.

HOMEPAGE

GauchoVolador
Senior Heliman
Location: Buenos Aires, Argentina

Lee
Few months ago I had to shoot inside an oil refinery and we were involved in several meetings with the plant's engineering and safety board. They took three months deciding if the helicam work inside the plant was safe or not. They made a kind of "Risk matrix" but dont remember how exactly it was. They ask us to asses for example:
* Every how many flights an accident happened.
* What caused these accidents.
* In the case of an accident will the fuel explode?
* Is it likely to lose control because of radio malfunction or interference, every how many flights....
and lot of questions like this....The idea was to make simple stadistics in order to asses whether flying the helicam was acceptable safe or not.
Cheers

Un Gran Saludo a Todos!

06-28-2004 Over year old.

daggit
Elite Veteran
Location: Waseca MN

Gaucho...

That's interesting, were you able to view end results of the risk assesment?

06-28-2004 Over year old.

HOMEPAGE

GauchoVolador
Senior Heliman
Location: Buenos Aires, Argentina

Daggit
They just called in one day and said "The operation was approved". For the shooting day they prepared a plan with all the procedures and made us to sign it, but never seen the end result, I can ask them to send a copy but dont know what will they say.
Cheers

Un Gran Saludo a Todos!

06-29-2004 Over year old.

JT_ Helps
Heliman
Location: Winnipeg Manitoba

have a look at the Canadian Air Force's Directorate of Flight Safety's website. Their Flight Safety manual has a chapter on risk assessments at:

http://www.airforce.forces.ca/dfs/p...35_Dec02_e_.pdf

cheers

Jeff

06-29-2004 Over year old.

electro212
Veteran
Location: Lancaster Pa

what chapter?
i looked and didn't see it

06-30-2004 Over year old.

HOMEPAGE

JT_ Helps
Heliman
Location: Winnipeg Manitoba

It is at Chapter 4 Annex A

Basically what you have to do is list the "risks" of an activity and then rank them according to their liklihood of occuring and their impact should they occur. If it is "likely" to occur and if the "consequences" are high, then you need to devise a corrective action and then reassess the risk.

For example (not necessarily accurate assessment - simply used to illustrate the process)

Reciever battery failure - liklihood of occurrence - occasional - consequence - catastrophic (loss of control - loss of helicopter - possible injury). Corrective measure - backup battery and/or dual recievers. Now while the consequence of failure remains the same (loss of helicopter - loss of control - posible injury), the liklihood has dropped to "unlikely" and no further action need be taken.

Whether or not you take corrective action is based on both this assessment and the cost of corrective action. One of the posts talked about "fuel exploding" after a crash. I would assess that as follows.

Post crash fuel explosion/fire. Liklihood -seldom. Consequence - Significant. If you use the table in Chapter 4 this comes out as a 3D risk and is pretty far down the list of things requiring action. However as the cost of corrctive action can be small (have 2 fire extinguishers rated for a gasoline fire available) you may wish to take that action anyway. I would not go to the extreme of having the fire department on standby.

To do a full risk assessment you have to list all the things that can impact a successful flight, in a number of catagories including:

equipment (state of the gear, failure of components, etc)
enviroment (weather, location, time of day, etc)
human factors (pilot skills, health, etc)

Seems like a lot but doesn't take all that much time once you understand the concept. At the end of the process you will have a list of corrective measures you have (or will) implement(ed) and a list of conditions under which the "mission" will be aborted or scrubbed.

hope this helps

cheers

Jeff

06-30-2004 Over year old.

heliraptor
Key Veteran
Location: Colchester, Essex, UK

Thanks everyone for al your help.

I'm sure this will be a good point of reference for everyone involved in future risk assessments.

Cheers

Lee

07-01-2004 Over year old.

HOMEPAGE

daggit
Elite Veteran
Location: Waseca MN

thanks for your insight JT

07-01-2004 Over year old.

HOMEPAGE

fitenfyr
rrProfessor
Location: Port Orchard, Washington

Something to think about

Risk assesement is in the eye of the beholder so to speak.
So when you are writing this plan try to not make it too "spooky" for the customer.
Address their concerns (if they have shared them) and then be honest in the results.

We do these all the time in the fire service.

Look for the hazard that can be mitigated and show how.

(Risk: loss of power due to low fuel. Solution: Ensure 100% fuel prior to flight)

Take the hazard that cannot be mitigated and show how you intended to prevent it from happening.

(Risk: Tail rotor failure inflight. Solution: Ensure proper seperation from aircraft and all objects during flight. any mechanical failure can be minimized by a through and proper pre-flight inspection)

Putting in dual batteries to reduce the likely hood of a receiver failure (a good idea) might not stop it, but more importantly to some readers it could sound like a reason to not allow the operation.
In otherwords it may sound to them as it happens frequently. Put a % out of the total operations on some of these risks so they realize where the biggest risk is and how often it happens. Make the numbers up based on your experience. Nobody keeps track of this stuff so what you come up with will be good in their eyes.

Sell the saftey of it through a well written risk assesement plan.
All to often we tend to look more at the "what if?" not the "what has" and that comes out in the tone of the assesement.

Did any of that rambling make sense.

Jason Stiffey
Fly Fast....Live Slow...

07-01-2004 Over year old.

HOMEPAGE

JT_ Helps
Heliman
Location: Winnipeg Manitoba

fitenfyr

Agree with much of what you say. I used the dual battery system simply as an example. Personnally I would use a redundant system in a very expensive model or in a situation where the consequence of failure was really high.

While using a risk assessment to "sell" your concept to the customer is a good idea, risk assessments are a two edged sword. They perform a function of demonstrating a responsible approach to the activity, however should something go wrong, they can be used to demonstrate negligence if you didn't identify and address the issue(s) that caused an accident.

Here in Canada in our civil actions for workplace accidents we have something called the "reasonable person" defence. Basically it allows you to defend your actions (or lack of action) if you can show that you did everything that a reasonable person would do in similar circumstances. A well written risk assessment would likely be considered reasonable. One that was challenged and found lacking in a number of areas would likely not be considered reasonable.

I think if you could also show that there were a number of occasions where you turned down a job because your risk assessment indicated the risk was to high, that would also be very supportive.

The above is not meant to be a major examination of the issue (I am not a lawyer nor do I play one on TV - man I miss the Mike "The Hammer" Shapiro TV ads) only as a reminder that anything put to paper can come back and bite you.

Overall a prudent approach to assessing risks would go a long way in demonstrating responsibility and keep government legislation out of the emerging heli-video industry.

cheers

Jeff

07-02-2004 Over year old.

fitenfyr
rrProfessor
Location: Port Orchard, Washington

My point

Jeff,
That was kind of my point.
I see too many people focusing on the "complete thermonuclear meltdown" kind of situations and not the real day to day problems and risks that are involved.
I guess I was trying to say don't go overboard and try to cover every single kind of mechanical failure.

Jason Stiffey
Fly Fast....Live Slow...

07-02-2004 Over year old.

HOMEPAGE

JT_ Helps
Heliman
Location: Winnipeg Manitoba

Jason

I see the same thing all the time with respect to workplace safety regulations, with the top two reactions being "my God how can I possibly comply with all the rules!!" or "Show me where it says I have to do that!!".

My reply to both is that irrespective of the rules (or lack thereof) there is a social and moral responsibility to end the day with (at least from a Health and Safety point of view) the same number of employees you started it with and in the same condition. That is where the focus should be and in most cases a common sense approach will meet legal requirements. I do however caution them to use the "yur on ur" test.

That is to simply add "your honour" to the end of any justification you would use to explain why you did (or didn't do) something.

"It seemed like a good idea at the time" may work in the lunch room, however "It seemed like a good idea at the time ... your honour" has a whole different meaning in a court room.

In any event I think we are on the same net. Concentrate on correcting the likely events and place less emphasis on the remote ones (like should you worry about what happens if you hit a goose with a ducted fan jet or what should you do if two F-18's pass 300 feet directly over your field on their way to do an airshow routine - corrective action on the first is to land as quickly as possible and go and look for the goose. The answer to the second is land as quickly as possible and go to the outhouse to cleanup - true stories )

cheers

Jeff

07-02-2004 Over year old.

fitenfyr
rrProfessor
Location: Port Orchard, Washington

Agreed.

I like the "your honor" line.
I will have to remember that next time I do a class on legal documentation here at work.

300 feet huh? That was something I am sure.

Jason Stiffey
Fly Fast....Live Slow...

07-02-2004 Over year old.

HOMEPAGE

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