"Go the extra mile" or Corporate Greed and Airline Safety...

Joszeph Varadi’s statements on how people at Wizz should, even if fatigued, “go the extra mile” for profit and growths mostly has drawn the ire of pilots and crew associations.

This comes after the European Cockpit Association and others have repeatedly drawn attention to Wizz Air’s seeming deficiencies in their safety culture for some time now but despite documented proof (p.ex:??https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-wizz-air-hldgs-job-idUSKBN2BV2XA) that should have at least raised concern with EASA, the EU Commission and national authorities, they were shrugged off.?

But, beyond being outraged at Varadi’s latest statements, we might need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

Varadi’s latest statements and his cavalier dismissal of fatigue, aviation’s “silent killer”, should set off alarm bells not only in Wizz ‘s safety department but also within the Boardroom of Wizz’s investors.

Outside of the operational environment, safety is often seen as a given, a false tribute to the excellent safety, or rather accident-free, record of European aviation.

Outside of the operational environment, safety is often seen as a given, a false tribute to the excellent safety, or rather accident-free, record of European aviation.

Varadi’s emphasis in his statement on growth and reputation seem to indicate as much. Safety is not even mentioned, it is either seen as irrelevant or as a given. Both possibilities would be equally wrong.

Combine this with egregious business targets given or sometimes imposed to a company by investors and you might suddenly have aligned a number of preconditions for a disaster down the road.

?According to a July 2021 article in the FT, the CEO of Wizz has been promised a ￡100.000.000 bonus if he is able to??raise the share price from ￡45 to ￡120 and achieve a 20% growth rate over 5 years!

While it is not my prerogative to judge the moral and economic sense of such an incentive, I wonder however, if this incentive would not have unintended but far-reaching consequences on the safety culture and the safety of Wizz, its passengers and its staff?

When you look at research into human behavior and decision making, it shows that monetary incentives (“a calculative mindset”) encourage selfish or even dishonest behavior and let people easily ignore ethical or social aspects of a decision. (P ex: “The social and ethical consequences of a calculative mindset”, Wang, Zhong, Murnighan, 2012)

We must ask the question whether we need to deepen our approach to safety and culture to the board rooms of our airlines and instead of mainly auditing the operational aspects, we need to dive deeper into the organisational complexities of airlines?

Whenever ECA pushes EASA and the Commission on article 89, the mandate for EASA to analyze the socio-economic aspects of flight safety, we usually think about the influence of atypical employment models or deficient safety cultures on reporting and decisions by crews.?

While EASA should??take a closer look at some airline’s??Corporate and safety culture, it might need to push open the doors to those cozy boardrooms to see whether the investors and their representatives are aware of their responsibility towards flight safety or??if they see it only as a faraway abstract byproduct of an airline.

Flight safety needs to start in the board rooms and this realization should encourage EASA to use its mandate to tackle safety issues not only on the flight line, but also at the root, in said boardrooms!