Usman Khalid is a master’s student in aviation management at Griffith University in Brisbane, with a growing focus on human factors and air crash investigation. Usman’s paper examines aviation safety management systems and the gap between measuring safety and truly understanding it. We talked about green dashboards, why it’s easier to add a checklist than remove one, and what a safety advisor with no budget could try on Monday morning.
Read the paper: Reframing Safety Performance Monitoring: From Lagging KPIs to Learning Reviews in an Aviation SMS.
Chris: Tell us a bit about yourself.
Usman: I’m based in Brisbane and studying full time. I did my bachelor’s in airline and airport management, then went straight into a master’s in aviation management because I’m interested in academia. Along the way, I’ve become more interested in safety and air crash investigation. A lot of that came from Professor Sidney Dekker, who taught us Safety-II and Safety Differently. I also attended an aviation conference in Canberra. It was focused on sports aviation, but most of the key topics came back to safety. There I met someone from the Australian Society of Air Safety Investigators who said it would be a good way into the field, so I joined as a student member and started researching aviation safety more broadly.
Chris: How did you end up in safety?
Usman: Through Boeing, really. I grew up thinking aviation was about as regulated and safe as it gets. Then came the 737 MAX, and whistleblowers raised concerns about the 787 as well. That was the turning point for me. One serious event, and suddenly a lot of people were coming forward to talk about what was behind it.
Chris: If a cousin at a family dinner asked what you’re up to and why, what would you tell them?
Usman: Safety is about looking after people. So much of aviation is about serving people, and safety fits right into that. It’s making sure we do a top-notch job and that everything is safe, not just for passengers but for the people working in the industry.
Chris: Was there a book, a person, or a moment that shifted your thinking?
Usman: Human factors, mostly, this trimester. I’ve always considered it, but studying cases where pilots were under stress before an incident pushed me to stop just blaming the person and look at the other factors involved. That’s part of what my paper is about. When you look closer at an accident years later, there’s often so much more behind why people did what they did.
Chris: Have you worked at the sharp end yourself?
Usman: Not yet. I went straight from my bachelor’s into my master’s, so my background is research. Next, I’m planning further postgraduate study focused on air crash investigation, which should help me decide whether to stay in research or work for an organization.
Chris: Any thoughts about getting your pilot’s licence?
Usman: I always wanted to be a pilot. A lot of us at university got our private licences, and then COVID hit just as we were working toward commercial. Friends who kept going and built their hours still haven’t found commercial jobs. That’s what stopped me.
Chris: Let’s talk about your paper. Why this topic?
Usman: What interested me was the difference between measuring safety and actually understanding it. Traditional assurance relies on injury rates, hazard reports, and audit findings. Those are useful, and I’m not dismissing them, but they’re proxies. An organization could have low injury numbers, say 95 percent of corrective actions closed, and mostly green indicators, while frontline workers are dealing with staffing shortages and time pressure. In aviation, nothing seems wrong until something happens. Then we go back and find a lot of contributing factors lined up, like the Swiss cheese model. So my question is what those numbers aren’t telling us.
Chris: Sum up your central argument in one sentence.
Usman: We need a new way of understanding safety, and at the same time we should look for low-value requirements we can remove or simplify. Pilots deal with a lot of manuals, and that restricts them. They can feel something is wrong and still not be able to speak up. Adding a procedure or checklist is easy because it shows action was taken. We very rarely ask: can this be removed?
Chris: We add something, but do we add value? What surprised you most in writing the paper?
Usman: How much confidence comes with maturity. When you’ve measured something the same way for years, and the indicators look good, it’s hard to question whether those measures give you the whole picture. Even a very mature safety environment can have weak signals and frontline concerns that conventional assurance misses. A green dashboard tells you what your system is measuring. It doesn’t guarantee your system is hearing everything it needs to hear. I wouldn’t replace existing SMSs. I’d build on them, keep the mandatory assurance requirements, and add ways of understanding work-as-done so pressures get spotted before they contribute to something more serious.
Chris: What did you leave out that you’d like to explore further?
Usman: Resistance from management. Implementation will be hard. Qualitative information can feel less defensible than numbers. Anyone can look at a green KPI and understand it immediately. A learning review needs more context. That’s why I’d run it alongside existing indicators at first and show what extra information it gives, rather than telling management that everything they measure is wrong.
Chris: Say I’m a safety advisor. Full plate, no budget. What does your work actually give me?
Usman: A better picture of what’s actually happening operationally, beyond what the KPIs tell you. You might see low injury rates, passing audits, and closed corrective actions, but none of that shows the pressure frontline workers manage every day, whether that’s ground handling, pilots, or cabin crew. It also shifts the role a bit. Instead of mostly collecting metrics, closing actions, and responding after incidents, you spend more time finding weak signals, removing constraints, and helping the organization learn before something goes wrong.
Chris: Are we measuring what can be measured, or what matters?
Usman: The goal has to be what matters. That’s the challenge. It’s hard to bring in something new, especially in big organizations that believe what they’re doing already works.
Chris: What could someone try on Monday morning?
Usman: Keep your current SMS and KPIs, and add to them. Go to the frontline workers and ask a few simple questions about their job. What made this job harder than expected? What pressures were you managing? What helped? What did you have to adapt? Which controls actually help you? What would make the next shift easier and safer? The people doing the work are the best evidence we have of what we can still improve.
Chris: One of my favourite questions is, what are you not telling your boss?
Usman: Probably quite a lot. Getting an honest answer to that would change the whole thing.
Chris: Half of safety management is selling the bosses. How do you sell senior leaders on something like this?
Usman: I wouldn’t pitch the whole idea up front. It comes down to trust. If leadership trusts their safety advisor, you propose trying something new without promising outcomes, because you’re working it out hand in hand with the workers. Once you have results, you take them to senior management and show what you found. Then it’s their call whether it’s worth implementing.
Chris: I’ll push back gently. Not every safety advisor has that trust. Many practitioners have to sell their bosses. And it’s not just bosses. Regulators, auditors, certifying bodies, clients, customers, and boards. How does this pass that test?
Usman: That’s a hard one. Where trust isn’t there- with leadership, clients, or shareholders- you have to earn it, and that’s why it’s important to try something more useful and more detailed than what we’re already doing.
Chris: What’s the failure mode? How does this go wrong when it’s done badly?
Usman: A lot can go wrong, same as with normal KPIs. You can tell people to speak up early, or to stay home when they’re not feeling well, but if they’re worried about losing their job, they won’t.
Chris: Or looking bad, or letting down their coworkers or passengers. There’s real human pressure there. What’s the strongest objection to your work?
Usman: The reviews I’m proposing are qualitative, and traditional measures are quantitative, so they’re harder to present to management. That’s where it could fail, unless people understand it isn’t replacing what’s already in place. It’s another layer of assurance that captures what numbers can’t.
Chris: Organizations are run by accountants and engineers, and they love numbers. My favourite engineer joke: “I became an engineer when I realized I didn’t have the personality to be an accountant.” What’s still unresolved for you?
Usman: How the two work side by side, and how a pilot phase would actually run in a large organization. Where do you start? Which part of the organization goes first? How does it work there, and how do you take it to the rest? That’s the biggest challenge.
Chris: What are you working on next?
Usman: More human factors, and air crash investigation, the side that comes in after something has already happened.
Chris: Who else should we be talking to?
Usman: Guido Carim Jr. from our program at Griffith. He pointed me to Safety Differently, and he was a great mentor.
Chris: What should our readers pick up?
Usman: Anything by Sidney Dekker. When I took his module, and again in my safety management systems course, nearly everything we read was his. If I had to pick one, it’s Ten Virtues of a Positive Safety Culture. It comes with a workbook. For ten weeks of the semester, we covered a different virtue each week, reflected on our own work, and considered how we could have done things differently. It ties back to what we’ve been talking about. If people are worried about their jobs and reputations, how do you get them to engage with new measures like these? That book is about self-reflection and developing yourself as a person, not just the organization.
Thank you. This article really resonated with me, particularly when I think about the KPIs we are currently looking at and whether they are truly measuring what matters.