Public speaking – Mr. Hart has drawn from his varied experiences to give public presentations in several areas, including the following.
1. Improving Process/Public Safety and Workplace Safety
In the mid-1990’s, when faced with a fatal accident rate that had stopped several decades of decline and was reaching a “plateau,” the US commercial aviation industry implemented a collaborative safety improvement process known as the Commercial Aviation Safety Team (CAST). Contrary to the opinion of many safety experts, who believed that the accident rate was already very good and could not be improved much, CAST resulted in a further decline in the flat, stuck, unimprovable accident rate of more than 80% in less than 10 years.
Mr. Hart has given presentations to many industries about the power of collaboration – as demonstrated by the CAST collaborative safety improvement process – to improve process safety (e.g., airplane crashes, plant explosions) in a variety of industries that are involved in potentially hazardous endeavors. These industries include other transportation modes, nuclear power, chemical manufacturing, petroleum exploration, petroleum refining, healthcare, and banks, to name a few.
Mr. Hart has also given presentations about the power of collaboration to improve workplace safety (slips, trips, and falls) in all industries in which employees are being injured.
2. Improving Automation
Mr. Hart has given presentations about the benefits and challenges of increasing automation, based largely upon lessons learned in decades of flight deck automation in aviation, and about how to automate more effectively and efficiently.
3. Automation in Autonomous Vehicles
Mr. Hart has given presentations that the autonomous vehicle industry is repeating many of the mistakes that aviation made because it is not paying adequate attention to lessons learned from decades of automation in aviation, mostly regarding the need for “human-centric” automation. His presentations also note that AVs will encounter several additional automation challenges that aviation did not encounter.
4. Urban Air Mobility
Mr. Hart has given presentations about automation challenges that will be faced by urban aerial taxis, similar to automation challenges in autonomous vehicles as noted above, as well as other issues such as propulsion robustness and redundancy and the lack of low-altitude air traffic control.
5. Boeing 737 MAX
The Federal Aviation Administration created the Joint Authorities Technical Review (JATR) to bring together certification experts from the FAA plus nine other aviation safety agencies around the world, plus NASA, to examine the certification process that the FAA used to approve the flight control systems of the Boeing 737 MAX. The FAA asked Mr. Hart to be an outside independent consultant to lead the JATR. In October, 2019, the JATR submitted to the FAA its recommendations about how to improve its certification process, whereupon the FAA made the recommendations public. Mr. Hart has given presentations about lessons learned from that process to help improve the aircraft certification process in the future.
6. Other Areas
Mr. Hart can speak about mass transit rail safety improvement lessons learned, based upon his experience as Chairman of the Washington Metrorail Safety Commission, and he can describe public utility safety improvement strategies based upon his experience as a safety consultant with a public utility.
7. Legal Issues
Mr. Hart is an attorney and he has given presentations at legal conferences on various issues, including:
Adverse Effects of Overzealous Criminalization of Accidents: Aviation accidents have often resulted in criminal charges brought against airline executive, surviving pilots, maintenance personnel, air traffic controllers, government aviation safety officials, and others. Mr. Hart has given presentations that overzealous criminalization from accidents can undermine safety improvement efforts.
Benefits of No-Fault Compensation for Injuries: As the complexity of operations in many industries has increased, the difficulty of identifying who was responsible when mishaps caused injury and damage has also increased. As the difficulty of identifying who was responsible has increased, the utility of litigation to exact compensation from them, and the likelihood that litigation can help improve safety, have decreased. Moreover, the threat of litigation reduces the willingness of the process operators to admit mistakes, which in turn undermines the ability to learn from their mistakes to improve safety. If the appropriate compensation for injuries and damages from the mishap were determined without the need to prove fault, the victims would be be compensated much more quickly, and the costs and diversion of resources for litigation would largely be eliminated. Moreover, process operators would be less likely to hide their mistakes, so those who created the mishap process could learn more about the problems that need to be remedied to prevent further injury and damage. Mr. Hart has given presentations about the potential cost savings and safety improvements in various industries, most notably healthcare, that could result from compensating victims without the need to prove fault.