The International Standard for Business Aviation Handling (IS-BAH) is the International Civil Aviation Organization’s (ICAO) program for FBOs and ground handlers based on the safety management system (SMS) concept. Introduced a year ago here at EBACE in Geneva, the IS-BAH program is well under way, with the first two locations certified under the standard in the last few months. In mid-February, the International Business Aviation Council (IBAC) announced at the Business Aviation India conference that New Delhi-based SRC Aviation was the first aviation service provider to reach Stage I certification under IS-BAH. Fort Worth, Texas-based American Aero was the first Western Hemisphere operator to be certified.

The IS-BAH standard is available for purchase in Europe and around the world through the European Business Aviation Association (EBAA–Booth A029). The first workshops were held at Paris Le Bourget Airport just weeks after the program was announced last year. The next European workshops will take place at London Luton Airport on July 7-8. Information on registration for that and other IS-BAH workshops around the world is available at the IBAC website www.ibac.org.

IS-BAH is a voluntary code of best practices. It superseded the U.S. National Air Transportation Association’s Safety 1st Ground Audit, and NATA was among the stakeholders in developing IS-BAH. The program was developed with feedback from representatives of all the industry stakeholders and closely mirrors ICAO’s earlier International Standard for Business Aviation Operators (IS-BAO) program, a factor that clearly benefitted American Aero at Meacham International Airport in Fort Worth. “We were hoping to be the first, but we wanted to take our time and make sure we were doing everything the right way to get where we needed to be for the audit,” said Riggs Brown, American Aero FTW’s general manager.

The FBO has been in operation since 2012, but its parent company Group Holdings has held IS-BAO Stage III certification for the past several years and channeled some of its safety awareness gained through IS-BAO to the new endeavor. “We had an idea of how we wanted that FBO to run,” noted Bob Agostino, the FBO’s vice president of operations. “So when IS-BAH was announced, it was no coincidence that a lot of our processes were similar to what it required. It just required some polishing and fine tuning as it was being adapted to the fixed-base operation type of venue.”

According to the company, one of the most challenging parts of the SMS culture to implement was a non-punitive self-reporting program to help mitigate risk. “Maybe in the past [employees] would brush it off, or if [the incident to be reported was] something that they did themselves, they would try to hide it. Now we encourage them to report these risks, these hazards, these incidents, so that we can be proactive and prevent these types of issues from happening in the future,” Brown told AIN.

Formalizing Standard Practices

Though many of the company’s procedures already equaled or even exceeded those specified in IS-BAH, from the time the standard was published last July, American Aero spent five months analyzing and refining its safety management manual and protocols. “We had to go back and re-evaluate what we do that’s not written down, but is common practice,” said Paul Cochran, the company’s line-service safety lead. “Going back through and doing a gap analysis on our policies and procedures was the biggest part of it. After that was in place, we went back through and double-checked to make sure that when we did get audited, there weren’t going to be any surprises.”

ICAO does not perform the audits itself, and instead relies upon independent trained examiners who are contracted by the individual company. “They basically took apart every aspect of our organization and reviewed it according to what IS-BAH had set in place for the audit, making sure that what we had in place either meets or exceeds their expectation,” Cochran said. “They examined the manuals, they examined the facility, they went out and witnessed our processes and procedures in action.” The auditors even interviewed employees to get their take on the SMS program and its effect on company operations.

In the end, the company believes all the effort to achieve IS-BAH certification was worth it and plans to be among the first to achieve further levels of certification. In addition, it expects that as the program gains widespread acceptance, certification will eventually become a way for discerning customers to choose service providers, not only in the U.S., but around the world. “Everybody has great service, everybody runs almost the same ads; there has to be some way for the customer to be able to discriminate between those people who talk the talk and those people who walk the walk,” said Agostino, a pilot himself for more than four decades. “These flight crews are fairly disciplined…and it’s reassuring to a customer, because I am a customer as well, that the people I’ve entrusted this asset to are operating with the same principles and philosophies that I fly the airplane to.”