 It was just about a year ago that the ICAS Board of Directors launched an ambitious effort to change the culture of air show safety.
From the beginning, the presumption was that safety had slipped somewhat from the position of primacy it had held for the better part of a decade. The goal was not to completely change our approach to safety, but -- rather -- to nudge it a bit back into the top spot.
Since then, we've had some ups, some downs, some successes, and some failures. Because the initiative was driven largely by a collective sense that something needed to change, our earliest steps were a bit tentative. We knew that the business needed a nudge, but we weren't quite sure where to nudge first.
The most encouraging and most important development was the near-universal enthusiasm that greeted our initial announcement of the initiative. Right away, members went out of their way to tell us that not only did they support the program, but that they thought it was a bit overdue. And that enthusiasm has not dissipated in the weeks and months since.
In the twelve months since we made our announcement, we've hired a full-time Director of Operations. We've created a new, twice-monthly, safety-oriented e-mail newsletter. We've launched a "Safety First" promotional campaign to help move safety back to top-of-mind awareness. And the initiative seems to have had some early success. Certainly, safety has become a more frequent topic of conversation during the last year.
But there's also been a lot of behind-the-scenes work going on that will have a more permanent and deep-rooted impact on the culture of air show safety. At the heart of this work is development of a Safety Management System for the entire air show industry, a program that seeks to look at safety management as a multi-faceted system that includes data collection, training, and specific steps taken to understand and mitigate risk in our business.
It's all very hard to quantify, but it seems as though we're heading in the right direction. As we work hard to develop a strong foundation of safety and risk management that will serve the industry well for many years to come, we're taking other, easier-to-implement steps that we hope will have a more immediate impact on improving safety in our business.
I hope that you'll continue to offer your support to these efforts and find your own way to mitigate risk and help us change the culture of safety in the air show industry.
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