Boeing’s Michael Delaney Details Company Safety Program On ‘Inside Boeing’ Podcast

On a recent Inside Boeing podcast, Boeing Company Chief Aerospace Safety Officer Michael Delaney spoke with Boeing Communications’ Michael King about his new role. He previously served as Vice President of Commercial Airplanes Digital Transformation at the company. Boeing Company ranked No. 17 on The Fair360, formerly DiversityInc Top 50 Companies for Diversity list in 2021.

Delaney first talked about how the elements of having a Positive Safety Culture activate the Boeing Safety Management System (SMS), which in turn help advance products and services. He said SMS is a directive coming over from the airline side of the business where the FAA “created an additional system to the compliance and conformance system that is really a top-down, organizational-wide approach to managing safety risks.”

He said it focuses on risk control that Boeing can take action on. Delaney next talked about how Boeing is making SMS successful.

“The underlining of that is the positive safety culture that we’re going to talk about,” he said. “Positive Safety Culture really has several elements to it that are critical.”

He said the critical factors that makeup Boeing’s Positive Safety Culture include being informed, flexible, learning, reporting and just.

Delaney added that Boeing “stepped up voluntarily to this SMS in the light of some of the incidents and things that have happened in the company.”
When it comes to making Positive Safety Culture happen, Delaney said the people at Boeing are really needed to do this.

“When you say employees, I think of everybody who works for the Boeing Company,” he said. “Sometimes when people hear employees, they think engineers or mechanics and they don’t think about management and executives. To me, everybody who is involved in Boeing, from [CEO] Dave Calhoun all the way down to myself, are employees.”

He said the team has to take a “collective effort to understand this Positive Safety Culture and to think about the actions and controls we have that can impact the safety of the fleet.”

Boeing is currently leading through commercial flights, but Delaney said the Positive Safety Culture also has implications for the defense and services side. Customers on the military side have also adopted these principles, he added.

Listen to the full podcast below or click here.

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