Insights

March 2026

Regulation by Retrospectoscope

Compliance is not safety. Large tranches of aviation regulation have remained substantively unchanged since the 1970s, yet the industry treats compliance with those rules as synonymous with safety. On tombstone regulation, the cargo fatigue exemption, the training-testing gap, and why the most insidious risk is the comfortable certainty that having ticked all the boxes means you are safe. (Part 6 of 3!)

February 2026

The Inanity of Root Cause Analysis

Root Cause Analysis demands a single fundamental cause for every incident. But in complex systems, the causal chain never ends — you can always trace it one step further back, all the way to a butterfly in the Amazon. This article argues that searching for missed intervention opportunities is far more productive than pinning a mishap to an arbitrary 'root.'

December 2024

The Risk of Risk Assessments

Risk assessment processes have a fundamental limitation: they only address imaginable risks, leaving organisations vulnerable to unknown unknowns. Drawing on a personal experience monitoring the 2012 Phobos-Grunt space debris re-entry during airline operations, this article examines how comprehensive risk registers can create false confidence and potentially increase exposure to Black Swan events.

October 2024

Correlation Does Not Imply Culpability

An application of three-dimensional risk thinking to electric vehicle adoption in residential settings. While EV fires are statistically rarer than combustion engine fires overall, the context — underground parking, charging infrastructure, high-intensity battery fires — demands a more nuanced analysis than headline statistics provide.

2016 — 2024 (three-part series)

Why Is Operational Risk Classification Two Dimensional?

A decade-long investigation into the limitations of standard aviation risk matrices. Traditional frameworks plot likelihood against consequence on a two-dimensional grid. This three-part series argues that frequency — how often an operation is conducted — is a critical missing third dimension, and proposes a practical framework for integrating it: Cumulative Event Risk = Risk Rating × Frequency of Occurrence.

Part 1 (the problem) | Part 2 (the mathematical proof) | Part 3 (the implementation framework).