The safety culture stack - building inter-organisational resilience in the aviation industry

Barry Kirwan

EUROCONTROL

Barry Kirwan has degrees in Psychology, Human Factors and Human Reliability Assessment, and has worked in the nuclear, chemical, petrochemical, marine and air traffic sectors of industry, and lectured at the University of Birmingham in Human Factors. He was formerly Head of Human Reliability at BNFL in the UK nuclear industry, and Head of Human Factors at National Air Traffic Services (UK). For the past seventeen years he has been working for EUROCONTROL, where he managed a team of safety researchers and safety culture specialists at the EUROCONTROL Experimental Centre in Bretigny, near Paris. In particular he ran the European Safety Culture Programme for Air Traffic Management for a decade, dealing with more than thirty countries in Europe, as well as collaborating with the Federal Aviation Authority in the US. He also advises UK rail and nuclear power industries on Human Reliability Assessment, has published four books and around 230 articles, and is a visiting Professor of Human Reliability & Safety at Nottingham University in the UK. He currently leads two large European Commission projects focusing on aviation safety research, safety culture and safety intelligence. One of his current aims is to spread the successful air traffic safety culture work to airlines. He also chairs an international group looking at safety and security research priorities in European aviation.