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Christchurch International Airport Ltd (CIAL) is a major hub and the busiest
and most strategic New Zealand air connection to the world’s trade and tourism
markets. The company has achieved an increase in passenger numbers through
collaborative marketing efforts with international businesses for tourism
growth. In January 2008, CIAL became the first carbon neutral airport company
in the Southern Hemisphere.
CIAL works closely with airlines and Airways New Zealand (Air Navigation
Services provider) to ensure the safety of passengers and personnel. CIAL
purchased AQD in 2005 from an understanding of the benefits it provides to
airlines and seeing how these benefits could be delivered to airports as well.
We use AQD in a number of important areas:
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Safety and Quality Audits
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Security incident reporting and investigations
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Bird strike reports
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Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) reporting and investigations.
AQD is used to not only manage our annual audit against Part 139 Regulation but
also as a general business tool across the commercial side of the business. The
value of AQD is in having all the audit information in one system with a
historical record over a number of years. So if the CEO wants a report of the
audits for a specific year we can produce the report from AQD at the push of a
button with all the details of the audit: Introduction, Summary, Findings and
Corrective Actions.
AQD is used to record breaches in security, for example personnel in a security
designated area without an I.D. card. From the security incident we develop the
findings and manage the corrective and preventative actions in AQD.
The problem with bird strikes is unique to airports. We use AQD to record the
data and produce statistics to ensure that we are in line with the Civil
Aviation Authority’s benchmark per 10,000 aircraft movements. If we are outside
the benchmark corrective action is required. From the statistics we can
identify trends and implement preventative measures more quickly than waiting
for the CAA reports, which has a direct safety and financial benefit for us.
We use AQD to record employee health and safety issues and manage the subsequent
investigation. We use the statistical reporting in AQD to show compliance with
the regulations and monitor the health and safety incident rate. If we can
demonstrate that we are reducing our accident rate and we are preventing
workplace accidents from happening, then our levies go down and this has a
direct financial benefit for the company.
Going forward we are looking at ways we can work more closely with Airways New
Zealand who also use AQD, to automatically receive data that they have
captured, e.g. bird strikes, upload this data into our AQD system and reduce
our administration costs.
We know we can get more value from AQD and want to develop this further by
integrating everything into one system. Our next project is to look at AQD for
risk-based Safety Management which will enable us to integrate proactive and
reactive risk management within our daily workflow process using AQD.
Mr Ford Robertson
Manager Quality and Security
Christchurch International Airport Ltd
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