Sean Broderick covers aviation safety, MRO, and the hardware side of the airline business from Aviation Week Network's Washington, D.C. office.
Broderick's aviation career started in 1991, working for Airbus in Toulouse. His industry experience includes four years with an aviation consultancy, where he helped launch a U.S. Part 121 carrier; 12 years with the American Association of Airport Executives, where he served as editor of Airport Magazine; and 20 years in full- and part-time roles with Aviation Week writing primarily about safety and the aftermarket.
Broderick was named the 2020 Aerospace Journalist of the Year by the Aerospace Media Awards. He also shared in a 2020 Neal Award for Best News Coverage with Aviation Week Network colleagues. Broderick and Aviation Week colleague John Croft shared the 2015 Flight Safety International Cecil A. Brownlow Publication Award recognizing "significant contributions by journalists to aviation safety awareness."
He graduated from James Madison University with a B.S. in Communications ('91) and earned an M.S. in Integrated Marketing Communications ('13) from West Virginia University.
By the end of last September's FAA/ATA maintenance human factors symposium in Orlando, organizers were joking that the case studies presented at the meeting suggested the perfect theme for 2008: "Failure to follow procedures." Kidding aside, it's no secret that not following procedures is one of the biggest problems in aviation maintenance today -- and that makes it one of the more interesting challenges to implementing effective safety management systems (SMS) in the MRO environment.
Meaningful data collection and analysis are keys to any solid safety management system (SMS). And while much data flows into SMSs, it's not often that a dataset offers insight on the effectiveness of SMSs and/or human factors programs. A recently released study conducted by the U.K. Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) does just that -- and also provides some interesting findings on maintenance errors in general.
The investigation into last year's crash of a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Predator B unmanned aircraft (UA) has provided a crackling case study for the growing field of UA human factors research.
