Commentary: It was just an accident

  • Published
  • By Lt. Col. Jeff Stands
  • 71st Flying Training Wing chief of Safety
VANCE AIR FORCE BASE, Okla. --  How many of us have heard a conversation between a parent and a child that involved the phrase, "It's alright, it was just an accident."

Unfortunately, accidents in our business are not alright. They often involve injury, pain, loss of equipment and ultimately the loss of duty and dollars. Not only do all of these mishaps impact our ability to perform our mission, they impact our lives at home as well.

Unfortunately, for 43 Air Force members this year, an accident meant the loss of their life. As we close out the "critical days of summer," it's a great time to reflect at the last fiscal year and see how safe we've been and how to make the next year safer.

Yes, accidents happen. However, there's a difference between an accident and a preventable mishap.

An accident is when all possible risk-mitigation steps are in place and the laws of probability still become reality.

A preventable mishap is when an accident happens and the person or persons involved either made some poor risk mitigation decisions or just failed to perceive the possible dangers.

For example, go to your favorite Web browser or enter the "YouTube" website. Search for the word "fail" and you'll see plenty of preventable mishaps. You'll chuckle at a few of them, grimace at most of the endings and hopefully wonder what the subjects of these videos were thinking before their 15 seconds of fame ended.

Yes, that's the question. "What was that guy thinking?" It's often very easy to look back at a mishap and answer that question.

Honestly, just about all of the YouTube stars thought they were safe. Why would any sane person attempt something that was going to hurt them? However, for these Internet superstars, their perception of safe is not at the level it needed to be.

The trick is seeing into the future, finding the unsafe things that cause accidents and hurt people and making them go away. That's where we need to focus our energy - predicting what could happen and then finding ways to prevent a bad outcome.

Fortunately, during duty hours, we do a pretty good job of staying safe. We have Air Force Instructions, safety gear, co-workers and supervisors that know better. Unfortunately, and as the statistics show, our ability to stay safe off-duty is not as good.

Fiscal 2011 was not the best in Air Force recent history for off-duty mishaps. Fortunately for Vance Air Force Base, we had a relatively clean year - and I thank you for that along with the rest of the base leadership.

We had zero fatalities, but totaled 31 off-duty mishaps - all of which impacted our mission accomplishment.

As for the Air Force, 43 members lost their lives off-duty. The vast majority of these, 33, were in vehicles - automobiles, motorcycles, boats and an airplane. Fifteen motorcyclists died this year. All were self-induced.

I know I speak for your supervisors as well as your families when I ask you to stay safe during fiscal 2012. We continue to get funding and manpower reductions. We certainly don't need to reduce those even more due to some preventable mishaps.

Starring in a YouTube video is certainly not what we're looking for. Not only will you get your 15 seconds of fame the hard way, but you'll hurt yourself, put more burdens on your co-workers and cost the Air Force money. You will put your family through pain and inconvenience as well.

Do I know how to prevent all mishaps? Certainly not. I don't expect that you can either. However, what I do expect is that the next time you're doing something that can wind up hurting you, take an extra thirty seconds and make sure you've taken all reasonable precautions to ensure your safety.