Keys to Creating an Effective Safety Standdown

Safety standdowns, a practice rooted in military aviation's response to accident clusters, have evolved into a structured and proactive safety management tool for civilian business aviation operators — and industry data underscores their urgency. According to a 2023 McLarens report, 64% of worldwide aviation incidents occur on the ground, encompassing runway incursions and excursions, ground vehicle conflicts during taxiing and towing, and hangar damage events. While not all ground incidents stem from procedural failures, a significant portion do — and that proportion represents addressable risk. Keith Wolzinger, captain for Part 135 operator Paragon Airways and Bombardier Safety Standdown keynote speaker, frames the standdown as a deliberate knowledge-transfer mechanism, one where topics such as FAR-mandated SMS program implementation, runway incursion prevention, and loss of control in flight are extracted from formal events and disseminated across flight crews who could not attend in person.

The operational case for dedicated safety standdowns centers on what Cameron McCune, aviation account executive at Alliant Insurance Services, describes as the accumulation of non-immediate priorities into compounding risk. In high-tempo flight operations, procedural compliance and vulnerability assessment are routinely displaced by scheduling pressures, and McCune identifies overwork, fatigue, and resource constraints as the three root causes most frequently traceable to preventable accidents and incidents. A structured safety day creates a forced pause — an occasion where operational teams can audit their emergency response plans, assess procedural drift, and engage with insurance underwriters and carriers who bring direct claims experience to bear on scenario-based training. FAA research supports the quantitative value of this posture, indicating that organizations with mature safety cultures employing standdown practices can reduce serious incidents by as much as 30%.

Robert Bergen, global head of training at CAE, positions the safety standdown within the broader architecture of a total safety system — one that requires deliberate integration across increasingly complex technologies, operational environments, and multi-vendor training relationships. Training providers, Bergen notes, serve as meaningful contributors when flight departments host these events, particularly as data analytics from simulator and recurrent training programs generate actionable safety insights that can be surfaced and contextualized in a standdown format. This multi-provider, data-informed approach reflects the reality that modern Part 91K and Part 135 operations typically maintain relationships with more than one training organization, each holding a different slice of the crew performance picture.

The peer-exchange dimension of safety standdowns — frequently undervalued relative to formal presentations — carries particular weight for pilots flying business jets and turboprops across comparable mission profiles. Wolzinger identifies informal crew-to-crew dialogue as a channel through which operational knowledge flows that no regulatory publication or ATC advisory fully captures: what other pilots have encountered in similar aircraft, in similar terminal environments, under similar constraints. This lateral knowledge transfer complements vertical safety messaging from regulators, manufacturers, and training providers, and addresses the tacit, experiential knowledge gap that formal curricula cannot always reach. For flight departments evaluating whether to invest in a formal safety standdown program, the convergence of ground incident data, SMS compliance obligations, and peer-learning value presents a clear operational imperative rather than an optional enhancement.