Aviation safety culture has gotten complicated with all the post-MAX-disaster scrutiny flying around. As someone who’s tracked aviation safety developments and organizational culture for years, I’ve learned everything there is to know about why the most effective safety work rarely makes headlines — and why that’s actually a sign it’s working. Today, I’ll share it all with you.
Most aviation safety improvements don’t happen because someone made a dramatic announcement. They happen because someone methodical and persistent worked through the data, identified patterns no one else was tracking, and convinced people who were resistant to change that the change was necessary. Jenny Blalock has been doing exactly that kind of work in aviation safety — and if you haven’t heard of her, that’s partly the point.
The Safety Culture Problem Aviation Still Has
Aviation has a complex relationship with safety culture. On one hand, commercial aviation is extraordinarily safe by almost any measure. On the other hand, the industry has a documented history of organizational cultures where reporting problems was discouraged, where pressures to maintain schedules overrode concerns about aircraft readiness.
The Boeing 737 MAX accidents in 2018 and 2019 exposed the worst of this — a culture where safety concerns raised by engineers and test pilots were documented, partially addressed, and then minimized in regulatory submissions. The Colgan Air crash in 2009 revealed how fatigue was normalized among regional carrier crews to the point where it wasn’t seen as a safety factor at all. These weren’t failures of technology. They were failures of safety culture — the shared norms, practices, and incentive structures that determine what happens when a safety concern collides with a business pressure. That’s what makes safety culture endearing to us who study organizations — it’s invisible until it fails catastrophically.
What Blalock Focuses On
Jenny Blalock’s work addresses something specific within safety culture: how organizations learn from near misses and low-level safety events before they escalate into accidents. Probably should have led with this, honestly — it’s the most important distinction in the field. Proactive safety management is rooted in the recognition that for every major aviation accident, there were hundreds or thousands of precursor events — incidents, anomalies, close calls — that were reported, misclassified, or ignored.
Her approach draws on Aviation Safety Action Programs (ASAPs) and Flight Operational Quality Assurance (FOQA) data to identify patterns that individual safety reports might miss. A single report of a runway incursion at a specific airport is a data point. A pattern of runway incursions at that airport during specific wind conditions, from specific aircraft types, at specific times of day — that’s actionable intelligence. The challenge is building organizations capable of asking the right questions about that data.
The Gender Dimension
It would be incomplete to discuss Blalock’s influence without acknowledging the environment she works in. Aviation remains one of the more male-dominated technical professions. The leadership ranks of aviation safety — both within airlines and at the FAA — have historically been dominated by men with pilot backgrounds. A woman approaching safety not from a pilot’s perspective but from organizational and data analysis perspectives faces different assumptions than her male counterparts would.
Blalock has spoken about navigating these dynamics with the pragmatism of someone who understands that influencing a safety culture requires working with the culture as it exists while pushing it toward where it should go. Credibility in aviation safety is hard-won, and the path to it for women has typically required demonstrating twice the competence while claiming half the credit. That she has earned that credibility is a significant professional achievement in its own right.
The Practical Work
Frustrated by the gap between collecting safety data and actually using it, Blalock has dedicated significant energy to building organizations that can surface patterns — which means investing in analytics capabilities that most aviation organizations have been slow to prioritize. A database of safety reports is only useful if someone has the tools and the mandate to find what’s in it.
What does safety culture change actually look like in practice? Training programs redesigned so that flight crews understand why certain reporting requirements exist, not just that they exist. Confidentiality protections for safety reports being actively enforced rather than nominally promised. Management demonstrating through their responses to safety reports that reporting is valued — not tolerated and resented.
Why This Work Matters
Aviation safety improvements have historically been reactive — accidents happen, investigations identify causes, regulations change. That model has worked well enough to make commercial aviation very safe. But it’s reached diminishing returns. The next generation of safety improvements will have to come from proactive risk identification, from organizations genuinely good at learning from near misses rather than waiting for the accident that forces change.
That shift requires people willing to do unglamorous work — who understand data, understand human factors, understand organizational behavior, and are persistent enough to push for change in industries that are structurally conservative. Jenny Blalock is doing that work. The aviation safety record of the next decade will be partly written by people like her, even if their names don’t appear on the accident reports that never happen.
