Welcome to the SFTE Safety Corner, a new, quarterly article looking to ask some questions; discuss best safety practices; and ideally get everyone thinking about the state of safety in their own Flight Test organizations.

First, a quick introduction, my name is Keith Gittemeier and I’m the new Safety Chair for SFTE. I’ve been a Flight Test Engineer for a little over twenty years now and over the past six or so years I have really started to lean into the safety side of Flight Test with a goal of trying to make sure everyone gets home at the end of the day.

Flight Test can be a dangerous job, but it shouldn’t be a hazardous one. Learning and adopting the lessons that others have already learned is one very effective way to make sure that we’re doing everything possible to ensure safe operations. Before beginning a new flight test campaign it’s worth searching for papers or videos from SFTE (www.sfte.org), SETP (www.setp.org), and the Flight Test Safety Workshops (https://flighttestsafety.org/rag/rag.php) to see if there are any existing best practices that can be followed or any test hazards to watch out for.

Along with searching for best practices and known hazards there are a number of tools that we can employ to help keep us safe during a Flight Test: training, briefings, buildup, standard calls, and knowing when to call it off and regroup. Over the next several articles I want to dive into these tools, hopefully be able to share some best practices, and ideally leave you with some thoughts to spur some conversations in your own flight departments. With that I’m going to start off by assigning you a bit of homework. On the Flight Test Safety Committee’s website, you can find presentations from many of the past Flight Test Safety Workshops. The one I’d like to highlight is From 2024’s conference in Seattle (https://flighttestsafety.org/2024-seattle-wa) entitled “Accident Investigation Board Results from a MQ-9 Fatality Mishap.” Even two years after hearing this presentation it still stands out for a number of reasons. First, the MQ-9 is an unmanned drone, yet there was a fatality mishap. Second, as I listened to the presenter I kept going back to those tools that I listed out earlier and wondered if one or more of those had been used would the outcome be the same? So, as you watch this video I’d ask you to keep the following questions in the back of your mind:

What training was given to the people involved in the mishap and was it the correct training?
Was the briefing adequate for the testing being conducted?
Were any standard calls briefed or used?
Was there a point where the testing should have been called off?

I’d also like to invite feedback from you all. I have some basic ideas about how to reinvigorate the Safety Committee, but I can’t do it on my own. If you have questions, answers, suggestions or would like to help out on the Safety Committee please send me an email at Safety@SFTE.org.

Thanks for reading,

-Keith