Continuous improvement in safety is paramount. Without it, we risk stagnation, or worse, moving backward.
This year’s CHC Safety and Quality Summit dives deep into this issue Nov. 12 to 14 at the Fairmount Hotel Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada.
Titled ‘Accelerate 2025: Building Safety Momentum,’ the summit puts the lens on what companies really mean when they talk about safety and how they remain focused on continuously increasing safety in their organizations.
“As safety professionals, we know if we’re not improving, we’re going to go backwards,” said Jon Hopkinson, vice president of safety, compliance, and flight standards at CHC Helicopter.
“In 110-odd years we’ve made a massive amount of progress with safety, but it’s very difficult to see progress from year to year on a smaller, company level. There is the temptation to say, ‘Oh, we’re safe enough,’ especially with tension between resources and output and companies having to do more with less. That’s where coming together to learn, share, network, and collaborate on safety, becomes so important.”
In its 18th year, the summit has already registered more than 350 professionals from across aviation and around the world to learn from a variety of speakers and each other. Each day is broken into two halves.
In one half, all attendees gather for keynote talks homing in on topical safety issues with breaks to network with one another. The other half offers attendees a variety of talks and workshops to choose from, based on their interests.
The summit features no sales presentations or even vendor booths. It’s entirely focused on providing opportunities to share experiences, thoughts, ideas, and reflections on safety. It is designed for anyone in aviation dedicated to increased safety, from C-suite leaders to operations personnel, Hopkinson said.
“This summit is about connecting around safety,” Hopkinson added. “We judge our summit’s success on if people who don’t know each other can get together, make a connection, and share ideas, and maybe those individual ideas will link up into something much bigger than any one of them had initially conceived.”
The summit features 23 workshops covering a variety of topics, including: safety training, unwritten ground rules affecting safety, and using AI as a safety tool to safety culture, safeguarding SMS from leadership change, and risk mitigation.
Many workshops are offered twice to allow for higher attendance, and more than 30 percent of the speakers are new to the summit this year.
Among the workshops is a presentation by Human Factors “Dirty Dozen” creator Gordon Dupont, who along with ACE Consulting’s Willis Jacobs will revisit the 12 most common accident risks and relate them to what that list looks like, or should look like, today.
The summit also includes optional two-day pre-summit courses, including a Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS) seminar, an accident and investigation analysis course, and–new this year–a safety culture leadership course focused on unwritten ground rules.
To learn more and register, visit the CHC Safety and Quality Summit Website.