Tim Wade – Ensuring Safety at FlexJet – EP.254

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(00:00:00) – Intro

(00:01:35) – The state of Aviation Safety

(00:10:09) – Adjusting internal communications

(00:14:24) – Aligning leadership teams with safety

(00:18:46) – Scoring & metrics

(00:21:03) – FAA involvement in safety regulations

(00:22:46) – Software improvements in aviation safety

(00:26:19) – Customer reviews

(00:29:27) – Benchmarking against the competition

(00:32:14) – Tim’s Podcast journey

(00:35:24) – Where safety experts need to be challenged most

(00:36:55) – Learning to “burn your hand on the stove”

Alex Bridgeman: Welcome to Think Like an Owner. This is a podcast where we chat all about how ambitious CEOs are growing transformative companies and, of course, diving into different industries that I’m personally curious about but also find really interesting from a CEO perspective. And Tim, I’m excited to talk to you today because the safety aspect of aviation, we’ve had a number of aviation guests on and that’s an industry I’m spending a lot of time in. And I’ve not spent as much time on the safety side of things, and I’m curious to hear your perspective, especially at a company as large as Flexjet and as influential as Flexjet on what the safety landscape looks like today and what that role entails. And so, I’d love to just kind of jump into that and get your take on what is safety like today? What’s your role look like? And how do you kind of go about your week? What’s that look like? 

Tim Wade: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, like you said, I’m with Flexjet. I’m the director of environmental health and safety for Flexjet. And I’m also on the safety committee for the National Business Aviation Association. So, most people just call it NBAA or NBAA. It’s one of the biggest business aviation organizations out there that help cultivate all of the things that we do in this industry. And they have a lot of influence legally. They are placed right in DC, so they have a lot of push on Capitol Hill to help influence our industry. And one of their biggest pushes is safety, as well with Flexjet. And I think industry-wide right now, safety is at the forefront, and it has been for quite some time. There’s a program called SMS, Safety Management Systems, and that came about in 2005, started hitting into aviation in 2005, commercial carriers started to adopt this. And ever since then, safety has been the top headline in the news. It has been the top article that you can research. It has been on the forefront of almost everything aviation related because that’s where our focus is. Unfortunately, the history of aviation, it hasn’t always been that way. If you research accidents and incidents back in the 60s and 70s, it was a rough time for aviation, even leading up into the 80s. And so we took that era of where safety wasn’t the focus and we learned from it and we pushed into this great aspect of where we are today where safety is on the front of everyone’s minds. So that’s kind of where the industry is right now. It is hyper-focused on safety and almost too much because you have one mistake and it hits every major news outlet. It doesn’t matter what airline you’re working for, who you’re working for, the smallest mistakes are getting into mainline media. And so, it is on everybody’s mind, not just within aviation, but also out in everyone else’s industry right now too. 

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, not to mention there’s a handful of really good YouTube channels that go over any accident that happens. Some are like 45 minutes or an hour. And as an aside, it’s pretty amazing that you can have both engines go out or one engine is destroyed and a whole bunch of other stuff goes wrong, and the plane still lands mostly fine. It’s a lot harder, but it gets there. That on its own is just kind of amazing. And you’ve mentioned like the pre-2000s being a much more interesting time for aviation safety. There is a- like a friends’ PowerPoint night where you just make a PowerPoint presentation on some topic you love. And I did one on D.B. Cooper, the guy who jumped out of the 727. There were like 10 or 12 hijackings doing the exact same plan the next year after that happened. And so, Boeing made a Cooper vane. It’s like a latch or flap that holds the door closed during flight. And they called it the Cooper vane, like named after him, which was pretty amazing. But where do you feel like- do you feel like there’s areas specifically where safety has maybe gone too far and it’s starting to hamper like operational ability? Where do you think that could be or exists? 

Tim Wade: Where do I see safety kind of overlapping a little too much? Because we’ve had such a push in safety, and I wasn’t in aviation in the early 2000s, I was still in high school and getting out of high school, so I didn’t see this great shift that we did have, but where I’m standing at now, I’ve seen the word safety almost become derogatory. People get a bad taste in their mouth when they hear safety, especially being in aviation probably because we get hit with it all the time. You hear it left, right, and center. And I think the word ‘safety’ is getting a negative connotation mainly because people view it as old-school safety and you hear it as it’s the safety cops and we’re just there to cite people and write people up when they go against policy and regulation, and that’s not what current day safety is or should be. Safety, we should be a resource. We are there to do risk mitigation. We are there to prioritize work based on risk, and like I said, the biggest thing is we need to be that resource leading with a servant’s heart. That should be how safety is looked at. And right now, some areas, some industries, some companies, they do have that down, but in overall general undertaking and how people understand and perceive safety, I would say people view it a little negatively. And a lot of them have prior history to kind of back that up. If you’ve been in the industry for 40 years, you probably don’t have a super positive outlook on safety just because of how it was in the past. And then from someone who’s not in aviation, not working in aviation, but possibly you fly all the time or you are continuously involved in aviation due to your job, you probably are pretty sick of hearing the safety brief every time you get on an aircraft. It’s the same thing, nobody pays attention to it, you’re just looking down. It’s just another block that gets checked. Now, I do think it’s important and it’s a regulation to go over, but I like that certain airlines and different companies are looking for innovative ways to convey that same message but in a more interesting way. Sometimes on long-haul flights, you’ll get a video where it looks- it’s a little more exciting, kind of captures your attention a little bit more. The message of safety is never going to change. The essence, the regulations, what we’re doing is essentially to make sure everybody goes home the same way they came to work, everyone gets off the plane the same way they got on it. But because our message isn’t changing, the way we convey it needs to change, it needs to adapt as technology adapts, as the industry adapts, and as people change, we need to make sure we’re getting the message out there and conveying it to the different generations coming up. So I see a lot of, like you mentioned, there’s some great YouTube channels out there. There are some outstanding YouTube channels that cover those accidents and incidents. There’s also other channels that do live streaming of airports, and it’s a 12 hour live stream of a certain runway. And you will see that that can be a great thing. Everyone gets to watch the aircraft, but it also puts a little more pressure on the teams if they know they’re flying into an aircraft or into an airport that has a watchdog right at the end of it, that’s a little pressure that you’re going to be getting off the camera. But that’s just one of those ways that the environment in which we’re operating in is adapting and is evolving to where we see people right now. It’s a lot more video based, it’s a lot more technology based. It’s reaching the general public in a different way. 

Alex Bridgeman: When you say that safety has a bad name, do you find that that’s primarily true internally on teams of operators like Flexjet or within airlines? Or do you see that more with passengers and travelers using aircraft? 

Tim Wade: Oh, that’s a great question. I will speak from the airline section first and the charter operators like Flexjet. And I would say, most of the safety teams that I have the pleasure of working with have that positive mindset that they’re leading from a servant’s heart. And I would hope that we are all conveying that message to our employees as positively as possible, so that way they do feel supported in that manner. I’m sure there’s some safety teams out there that just don’t care. I’ve ran into a few that their policies are just binders up on the walls and it’s not something that they actually practice. You know the old school phrase, practice what you preach. And unfortunately, some of them just write down these policies and stick them up on the wall. But then from the customer standpoint, the customer is investing in your company by buying a ticket or purchasing some charter time on your airline. They want to feel not only supported that they’re getting what they paid for, but they’re entrusting you with their lives, with their light livelihood, with their baggage, with their personal belongings. So they want to have that sense of security and not only safety with them physically on the aircraft but safety with their information, safety with their privacy. Safety bleeds into a lot of different areas of our industry and the customer wants to have that comfort that they’re trusting you with that. You need to really establish that relationship. So, whether you’re on a charter operator like I am or you’re on the airline, it’s a big responsibility that you should take seriously that these people are entrusting you with so much more than just getting them from point A to point B. They are entrusting you with a lot of different aspects right in the middle of that. 

Alex Bridgeman: What are some ways internally you’ve found to communicate safety in a more positive and maybe uplifting note? How do you kind of adjust that narrative and storytelling in the right way? 

Tim Wade: So we are definitely in a time where we have a mix of generations coming through aviation. The baby boomers are on their way out right now and are retiring, and they’ve seen a lot of things from the beginning and a lot of big changes that helped influence and make us better in aviation and definitely safe. And we have a lot of young folks coming in. There are a ton of brand new people coming straight out of school into the airlines. We were just doing an in-doc class for some new employees, and I’d say about half of them weren’t even alive on 9/11. And that hurt because it’s like how is that even possible? But it’s like that was over 20 years ago. It’s definitely possible. And it was just a little bit of a culture shock. So, one of the best ways to convey the safety message positively in your organization, especially right now in this day and age, is making sure you have multiple avenues of communication because you’re speaking to multiple different generations. The older generation might not want those TikTok style videos where you’re conveying a safety message in 60 seconds and you’re hoping it lands and it’s exciting, it’s flashy. Some other people might just want it written down in a nice one-page PDF where they can sign off on it, and that’s just the way they’ve always done it. There’s nothing wrong with that either. There’s multiple ways to, excuse me… There’s multiple ways that you can convey a great safety message that’s impactful to people. One of my favorite ways to do it though is video-based training. I don’t care what generation you’re from, death by PowerPoint, nobody likes it. So if you’re doing a 60-slide presentation on a PowerPoint over safety, you’re doing it wrong, hands down. If you need to do a PowerPoint though, which they are necessary at times, record it, overlap it with audio, because not everyone is going to interpret your bullet points the way you wanted them interpreted. So if you did an audio overlay of your PowerPoint, it’s really easy, just scroll through your deck and record the audio to each slide, then somebody could kick back and just watch it and then they’re not doing the work, they’re not trying to decipher what you meant, not trying to pick apart and figure out what is going on in each bullet point. So that’s one option. And then another option is if you are really trying to convey a message of safety that involves actually going out on the hangar floor, involves going out to the aircraft, record it. Do a 60 second video, do a five minute video of here’s what’s actually going on. Not only does that speak to them in a really positive manner that you’re taking the time to actually put a product out to them, but it also shows that you are an involved safety team getting out on the hangar floor and leaving your desk and actually going out there and doing something. So, I like video. I like the audio aspect of it. I like taking what works and making it a little easier. Because I really think the key point to make safety actually work for all the generations, ease of access, make it easy for people to get your information and to come to you. And that’ll really help you in the long run. 

Alex Bridgeman: The visual aspect is I think really important too with video, especially because so much in aviation is very visual friendly and easy to make into a video, but it gives you like an object or something to see and imagine being a part of or being in that written just doesn’t do in the same way. 

Tim Wade: And it doesn’t matter if you’re on the flight side or the ground side, so pilot versus maintenance, does not matter. We are almost all visual learners. The pilots go through flight school and everything’s written down. They have manuals that they can read. Even during an emergency situation, they’re grabbing for a physical manual that they’re going to be looking at charts, diagrams, and a checklist. Same thing with our mechanics. They are looking through a manual with charts, diagrams, and a checklist. That’s how they operate as well. So, if you can make that visually appealing and actually work through it and walk through something with somebody, it’s going to hit them a little more impactful than, hey, go scroll through this PowerPoint or read through this PDF. Works for some people, but I would say the mass audience that you have is going to reply and react a lot better to some good video-based training. 

Alex Bridgeman: And what are some ways, too, of aligning a leadership team with safety? I imagine most leadership teams in aviation probably care a lot about safety just as a default, but any time you can get the CEO and executive team kind of behind your message, that lends very helpful credibility and influence within the team. What kind of cadence or how often or how do you tell that story with the executive team so you’re both aligned and kind of moving forward on safety with the same idea? 

Tim Wade: Well, the first thing you need to do between safety and the executive leadership is have a good conversation where leadership needs to understand that budget is not everything, and then the safety team needs to understand that safety, it’s not safety at all costs. It needs to come together. It does not make sense for a company to completely bankrupt itself because you blew all of your money on safety equipment, especially if there is nothing stating that you even needed it in the first place. I see often you’ll walk through facilities, even aviation, even out of aviation, where you see like a hundred AEDs out on the wall. It’s like how many people are having heart attacks in your facility that you need that many AEDs? They’re about $5,000 a piece. Did you even do a risk assessment that that was your risk that you needed to put that out there? Now, I’m not saying don’t spend any money on safety, but it needs to be a good conversation and a good relationship that, hey, safety is going to do their due diligence by doing risk assessments and making sure we’re vetting everything that we need it. And then you present that case to your leadership team, and then they’re going to vet it and make sure it fits into the budget and it works well. And strict cohesion. Now, there’s going to be your one-offs where it’s like, oh my goodness, we need to do this or the risk is just way too high, the business could come to a screeching halt. It doesn’t happen very often, if ever, but that’s also another good conversation. So you asked about meeting cadence. The cadence I like, it actually flows into what you’re required to do with your SMS program because part of an SMS, your accountable executive, which is usually your president or CEO, he is required, he or she is required to be involved and educated on the goings on of your SMS program. They need not just a quick we ran two hazard assessments. He needs to be involved to the point that they can recite and reciprocate everything that is going on in your SMS program, at least from a high enough level. So what we do is a monthly safety meeting for what we call FSRs, facility safety representatives. Every location has a couple FSRs. They do the monthly audits of the facility. They’re kind of my eyes and ears on the ground. And I’ll check in with them every single month and we do a meeting where here’s what’s going on from the corporate aspect and let’s dig into each location and see what they have going on. And then you do a quarterly accountable executive meeting where you take all of your safety boards that you have going on. So I’m just speaking from the ground perspective because that’s my main focus, but flight has a meeting, there’s a risk assessments meeting, there’s a risk review board, there’s a maintenance review board. So there’s a lot of different little safety teams that hold monthly meetings. They all get together and we produce a quarterly accountable executive meeting. That way, they are getting completely briefed on all the goings on throughout the entire organization. And we want to do it that way. That way, everything that we have from a risk-based perspective, anything that could come up and bite you, anything we’re working through, anything we’ve completed is getting presented, so they have all the knowledge they can have to make great decisions down the line. 

Alex Bridgeman: Is there some objective scoring to that process where you can, through that audit, you can put together like here’s a number that represents our score or how effective we are this month? I like being able to try to- how do you put quantitative measures around things that you’re doing and especially more squishy, qualitative stuff. How do you go about scoring something like that? 

Tim Wade: I would say I want to make the information palatable, make sure people can actually digest what you’re putting out to them. And yeah, we actually have- and not just one number, we have tons of different metrics that we can follow. It just depends on what part of the business you’re looking into. The main metric that we do see continuously involves every single report that comes into the safety department gets what’s called an IRC. And our team came up with this a while back, and it’s worked really well. And our vice president of safety is a, I wouldn’t really call him a numbers nerd, but he loves his numbers and data. And it’s actually worked in this beautiful pattern. So we do an IRC on everything that comes through. Doesn’t matter what it is. Hey, I nicked my finger and I had to get a bandaid all the way up to damage events all the way up to, doesn’t matter what it is, if it’s a report that comes through the safety department, we’re doing an IRC. That will give you the likelihood and severity, like almost every risk assessment does. It also gives you a score, gives you a weight. And based on that score, we go to a tree that tells you, hey, if it’s this number to this number, you’re going to just track and trend it. That’s a low enough risk. We can track and trend. We’re good to go. Once it starts getting a little higher, you have the option to do what’s called a safety risk assessment. It’s a little more in-depth investigation. You’re going to start asking more questions. You’re going to start getting out on the hanger floor and checking out what’s going on with this. An SRA is possible at that time. Once you get a little bit higher, you’re required to do an SRA. And then as the score goes higher from there, there’s different levels of leadership that are required to buy off on that if you are going to accept that risk. So, not only is it a good metric to run, but there is a element of risk acceptance involved. Because you never want to put the organization at risk, you never want to put an individual employee at risk. So how high are we willing, how high of a risk score are we willing to accept at that time before we just cut that task out or whatever we’re looking at at that point. 

Alex Bridgeman: So where along the line in daily operations and weekly, quarterly, yearly does the FAA get involved? Where do they come into the picture in terms of their own audits or assessments or sign-offs? 

Tim Wade: So they have different audit cadences that they’re going to come in, they call it surveillance. And then they have different tasks. And it just depends on who the auditor is. You might have an avionics auditor, you might have your main maintenance auditor. Flight, same thing. They’re going to be sitting down with the pilots, they’re going to be sitting down with our flight teams. There’s an office that just audits records. There’s an office that audits drug and alcohol. Foreign certificates. If you have an EASA certificate, if you have a Canadian Air Transport Certificate, they’re going to come audit your records as well. So everyone has a different cadence. It just kind of depends on what they’re auditing, who’s doing the audits, and what certification you’re trying to hold at that time. But every audit comes with what’s called a DCT, a data collection tool, and that has a set of questions that the auditor needs to answer and most likely provide proof of whatever the answer was. So, for example, going through SMS, one of the questions is, does every employee have access to reporting? Well, we can’t just say yes, we need to actually go show that auditor, yes, here is our reporting system. Here is how the employees access the reporting system. Here’s the training showing us, showing you that we did train the employees on accessing the reporting system. So it gets pretty in-depth, even for a simple question. It’s never just a yes or no. It’s, where is it? Were they trained on it? Do they know about it? You have to really support your answers with everything that they ask. 

Alex Bridgeman: Is there any recent tech or software that you’re excited to try or implement towards a safety lens at Flexjet? Like what’s the latest and greatest that we should be paying attention to? 

Tim Wade: There’s a company called Polaris and they have a great reporting system called Focus. It’s not something we utilize at Flexjet, but I’ve seen that program grow leaps and bounds. And the people who are utilizing it seem extremely happy with that. I’ve seen them all over social media. Personally, what we’re using at Flexjet though, for safety though, we actually created. So, we looked at, and this was back even before I was with Flexjet, when I was with Constant Aviation, we looked at so many different software platforms when we were going through the SMS credentialing process. And we started with an Excel sheet, and we’re like, well, this is just not going to work for a program as big as SMS. What can we use? So, I tried them all out, and there was nothing, because I always like to say, under the directional aviation capital umbrella, we’re different, we’re set apart. And it’s hard to fit what we do, whether it’s Flexjet, Constant Aviation, whatever, any of our brands, it’s hard to fit that into a cookie cutter mold of a software platform or anything else that you would want to fit us into. And we tried to do that. Even just on the maintenance side, we tried to get a software that was going to work well for us and going to get us through SMS, and it just wasn’t there. And wasn’t there at the time, so we built a program through a platform called Airtable. And it’s basically a glorified version of Excel. It’s got some cool things to it. You can build a database, you can turn that database into an electronic form, take that form, attach it to a QR code anywhere in your facility, and now you have electronic reporting. You can also set up automations where if a report gets submitted, it’s going to automatically notify those involved in that. So, we started using that, and we use that as a very basic function where it’s just reports in or reports out, and it worked well for SMS. Fast forward five, six years now, we have grown this thing into a monster. I mean, we do fatigue reporting for pilots through this, we do training, we hold hard industrial truck certifications through it. It is all of our incident and injury reporting and our SMS database. This thing is a wonderful tool because of how much effort we have put into it. Now, I’m sure now being six years later, I’m sure there’s a great tool out there somewhere that might fit what we want it to do, at least a little bit. But the one thing we love about having something that we built in-house and it’s ours, is if it’s two in the morning and somebody needs something changed on it, all I gotta do is click and change it. It is fully customizable because it’s ours. And I think a lot more people are starting to see the need for 100% customization because there’s no two companies that are identical. I mean, if you even looked at us and our next competitor, NetJets, we are two starkly different companies. So the software that supports those companies needs to maintain that as well. Our maintenance record software does the same thing. It is very customizable and we have trained it and tailored it to exactly what we need it to be. And the end goal is making it easy on the customers, and as safety, our customers are the employees. And then when it’s for maintenance, it’s getting the aircraft back out on the line to actually serve our customers. So, the quicker we can do that, the more we can customize, the more easy we can have access to our systems, the better it’s going to be in the long run. 

Alex Bridgeman: You mentioned just now that your customer is your internal team. Do you do like customer reviews on us as the safety team, like how effective are we? Like what can we do better? How does that feedback loop work? Or do people just come in and start yelling at you? 

Tim Wade: Well, there’s that too, of course. You’re safety, you’re never right until they need you. No, we have a great group. Being honest with you, I hate safety surveys. And not because they’re not effective, but because they tell you what you don’t want to hear. And we have a longstanding motto at Flexjet, we’re very transparent. Don’t ask a question if you don’t want the answer to it. It might not be the answer that you want to hear. Same thing with safety. I hate asking the questions – hey, is this working? Because like I said, that software that we developed and the programs that we have in place, we write all of those. We don’t buy anything off the shelf when it comes to safety. We don’t buy an SOP. We don’t buy a software. We handle it all in-house. So if we ask them, hey, is this working? And they say no, it’s complete garbage. Nobody wants to hear their baby’s ugly, and that’s our baby, so we’ve put a lot of time and effort in it. So it is difficult to do a safety survey, but they are necessary. So yes, we ask for feedback all the time on things. One of the best tools that we do is called Indoc. Our new employees, when they come through, we do indoctrination for the new employees, and we tell them, hey, here’s what we’re doing. You guys are coming from, if you’re not brand new to aviation, you’re coming from another aviation related organization, let us know what we’re doing right, let us know what we’re doing wrong, come talk to us, we always just want to improve. Because just because it works for us in the safety department does not mean it’s going to work with the end user. I could write a great fall protection policy, but by the time it gets out to the guy that actually needs to strap in on the harness and get up on top of the aircraft, it could be terrible. And I want to hear that. I don’t want to enact a policy that is going to hurt somebody or make their job more difficult or make them resent the safety department, to be honest with you. So, we do need that feedback from time to time. And we do safety surveys, and we tell people that we are available 24/7. The QR code I mentioned of how people can actually report incidents and injuries and things like that, right underneath it, it’s on a poster at every facility that we have, and right underneath it is our safety hotline number. They can call that 24/7 and it will ring through every member of the safety team until somebody picks up. So we want to be accessible, and if somebody has an issue with what’s going on with us, we definitely want to hear it. 

Alex Bridgeman: One concept I heard about recently that I’m becoming obsessed with is benchmarking. So, understanding, okay, this is the state of our company in the industry today. But what is our- how do we benchmark ourselves against the rest of the industry and what everyone else is doing? It’s a concept that I heard about from this podcast that Mitch Rales, one of the Danaher founders, was on and he talked about doing it for NFL stadiums, which different business, but I like the idea, and I’m curious if you apply that at Flexjet and find ways, because there’s ways internally for you to evaluate how are we doing generally or on an absolute basis internally, but is there a mechanism that you use to find out how do we stack up against other very safety-minded operators in the industry? I don’t know if like the head of safety at every operator, if they’re all like best friends and they have some like little community that they all hang out in. But are there ways that you can kind of benchmark Flexjet against others? 

Tim Wade: There are. Is it as granular as a numbered metric? No. But one thing that most of the major players in aviation can at least agree on is that safety is not a marketing tool. It is not competitive with an edge of safety because- and I think we’re one of the only departments that would ever think like that. But if something happens to one of our competitors, it happens to the entire industry. Nobody really cares what the brand was on the aircraft. It was there was an aviation related incident. I hate to even bring it up, but the incident that was down in Florida months ago or maybe even a year ago by now, no one really looks at the brand of aircraft that that happened to, unless you’re in aviation. The customer face just sees it was a business jet. So all business jets are now affected and look at that. So we look at it the same way. Safety is not marketable. It’s not competitive. If one thing happens to a competitor, it’s essentially happening to us as well. We’re going to at least feel the ripple effect from it, especially if it produces a regulation, if it produces more involvement with the FAA. If it was like a shared customer, we were counting on business from either that customer working on that aircraft or something like that, you’re going to feel the ripple effect from it. So a good way to do a benchmark for safety is to get involved with as many associations and organizations as you can. That way you are conversing and working with other industry leaders. So right off the top of my head, I work with MBAA. Our VP of safety also is with MBAA. We also work with the Air Charter Safety Foundation, Bombardier Safety Stand Down. Our folks go to InfoShare and submit ASAP data through InfoShare. So there’s a lot of different great organizations where you might not be looking at it from a competitive edge of, oh, we’re doing so much better than these people, but you’ll definitely be looking at it to what are the other operators and the players in the field doing that we can improve ourselves as well, and what are we doing pretty good at this point where others might be struggling. We can pat ourselves on the back and this is going great. Let’s maintain what we’re doing in this section. But also, what about that that we’re doing well can we put out to the rest of the industry to bring them up as well? 

Alex Bridgeman: I love that. One final interesting question I’d love your thoughts on, as a podcaster in safety, what kind of themes or messages are you excited to share on your podcast for aviation safety? I always think its interesting people who take a niche and make a show out of it. So, I’m just kind of personally curious what that looks like for you. 

Tim Wade: I’m shocked the podcast got bigger than just like three episodes. I thought to myself when I started it, how much can you actually talk about aviation safety? But the reason I started it was nobody was talking about aviation safety. At the time, there was not a dedicated podcast or YouTube channel just to aviation safety, so I wanted to start it based on that. And it has opened up a lot of great conversations. I love the guests that I’ve had. It’s informative conversations. And some of the episodes that have had the biggest viewership and the most questions and comments are the ones where, and I’m going to steal my buddy Colin Russell, he always uses the phrase, challenge me. And those episodes where we are challenging something, where we are pushing the bar a little bit and maybe touching a pain point for people really increase the viewership and increases the engagement. And not to offend anybody or make it difficult to watch, but you want to challenge your thinking, or else you’re never going to evolve past your comfort zone. So there’s been a few episodes where it was a challenging topic on SMS, how to do risk management, what’s acceptable risk. I also had Niven Phoenix on. His father passed away in a Chinook crash that is starting to turn into kind of a conspiracy theory now because the government involved in the crash actually sealed the records for a hundred years, which that just sounds bananas to me. So, we spoke on that, and his mother actually started a career in mental health after that helping people who have been through trauma. So that was a wonderful conversation. So, looking forward, the episodes that I really want to do, and I don’t care if I do two a week or one every two months, I want to make sure it’s a conversation that I’m invested in, that’s interesting, and that others are going to take joy out of. I don’t want to just put content out to put content out because I don’t think that’s- I can’t hold a conversation like that. This is not my day job. This is at best a hobby for me. So if I just did too many episodes, I don’t think my heart would be behind it. So going forward into 2025, I would really like to get on people with interesting stories in aviation, people who might have seen trauma in aviation. I would love to have- we work with a company called Fireside Partners and they do emergency response training and care team training if an organization has an incident. I’d love to have their people on because that’s a side of our industry that nobody hears about and that some people don’t even want to hear about it. They don’t want to know that we need care teams set up because things do happen from time to time in aviation. It’s just the reality of it. So I want to talk with people like that. And so I have a couple lined up for 2025. I think it’s going to be a great year for this, unless my time slot for my hobby shrinks down even more than it already is. 

Alex Bridgeman: To the idea of challenge me, where do you think experts and executives in safety need to be challenged most? 

Tim Wade: I think we all need to be challenged when we realize that we’re not as good as we think we are, and that is safety in general all across aviation. We have gotten to a point now where we have not had a major incident in a long, long time. Some people might go back to the MAX issue, but that wasn’t necessarily a human-caused incident. That was a design flaw. And you might go to a few of the business aviation crashes we’ve had. True, but we have not had repetitive, massive incidents, and we’ve gotten comfortable. I feel it. I think a lot of people feel it, that aviation safety is, in general, right now, we’re getting a little comfortable, and comfort is going to lead to a little too relaxed. So that’s where I think we need to be challenged. We need to look at our history and make sure we are still continuing to resolve everything that has been in our past. And looking towards the future, there’s a lot of emerging technology right now in aviation. Are we doing everything we can to vet the risk of that moving forward as well? So I would want to push people on that and I think the one thing that we should always be pushed on and always be challenged on is that safety is service. We are here to serve the public who flies with us but we are also here to serve the employees who trust us to write the proper policies and to maintain a great resource of safety in their organization. 

Alex Bridgeman: Have you listened to the Dan Carlin Hardcore History Podcast by chance? 

Tim Wade: I have not. I’ll write that down. 

Alex Bridgeman: It’s really good. It’s a well-known history podcast. He was in radio before. He has a wonderful radio voice. But I just finished this like four or five part series on the war in the Pacific. And one concept he talks about is every generation kind of has to learn to burn their hand on the stove. Like that’s kind of how you learn things. And you burn your hand on the stove, you’ll never touch the stove again. Maybe your kids, maybe they’ll learn that from you, and they probably won’t touch the stove, but maybe the third generation has forgotten what burning your hand on the stove feels like, and now they have to do it. And this kind of sounds like a similar concept, like when there’s a big incident, then we’ve burned our hand on the stove, we’re really like acutely aware of that, but eventually you get comfortable again, and the concern is that the cycle has to repeat itself. 

Tim Wade: And I definitely think that’s where we’re at now is we do have some older pilots and older mechanics that remember some of the terrible tragedies we’ve had in our past. But like we said right off the bat, there’s people in docking who weren’t even alive during 9/11. And for me, that was the one of the worst air tragedies in my history. But I also don’t have the history of the Lockerbie bombing and the Colgan air crash and a lot of those major incidents that have really kind of formed safety regulations going forward, I don’t have that real history of that. I did not live through it. So we need to make sure we’re taking those stories and really conveying them in a positive way to let people know why we’re doing the things we’re doing. Because one of the things that is going to lose trust in safety is people don’t understand why the regulations are the way they are and that they came from an era and a time when things were not so good. Well, now things are good, and they think that the regulations and the standards that we practice right now are almost worthless because they’ve never seen the why behind them. So we need to make sure not only we’re saying, hey, this is what we’re doing, but also here’s why we’re doing it. Here’s the history behind it. 

Alex Bridgeman: Yep, I love that. Well, Tim, thank you for coming on the podcast. It’s been a ton of fun. I’m excited to keep chatting and learn more about Flexjet safety as well. But in the meantime, thanks for coming on the podcast and also have a good holiday ahead of you. 

Tim Wade: You as well. Thank you so much for having me. I’m definitely going to have you on mine, too. I want to talk about how you got your podcast so popular and how you got started up. So thank you so much for having me.