Applies ISO-9000 Principles To Aero-Businesses

Baldwin Aviation Inc. (BAI), a service company founded in 2004 to assist flight departments in meeting regulatory requirements and establishing safety-oriented operating standards, has become the first firm of its kind to achieve the International Standard for Business Aviation Operations (IS-BAO) Registration. BAI received the certification last month, after more than two years of program and software development.

Introduced in 2002, IS-BAO is a code of best practices designed to help flight departments worldwide achieve a high level of safety and professionalism. It essentially uses the ISO 9000 principles structured to apply to aviation safety, offering a flexible approach which allows flight operations to define and customize their own solutions to meet industry-wide criteria for safety and compliance.

Balwin Aviation president Don Baldwin tells ANN that what BAI has already accomplished will cut the time and expense of qualifying for IS-BAO Registration for subscribers to its full service Safety Management, Standards and Shared Resource program.

"IS-BAO compliance involves the creation of a significant amount of materials, as well as documentation and continual assessment. Recreating all of the manuals, accessing the library of regulations and maintaining accurate records would be an extraordinary undertaking for an individual flight department, but we’ve already done virtually all of that ground work," said Baldwin.

"This means our clients are able to focus on tweaking our program to their specific operations. They can concentrate on doing the things necessary to improve safety as soon as they engage our services. We literally bring with us a collection of manuals, forms and documentation tools—and the knowledge of how to use them—that allow our clients to reduce the time they need to qualify for IS-BAO registration from 12 to 18 months down to approximately 3 to 4 months."

Baldwin noted IS-BAO Registration isn't an end in itself, either.

"For approximately 30% of the cost our clients would incur to comply on a one-time basis, we’re offering them the benefits of a long term relationship that will provide the resources and expertise they need to prepare, initially, for an independent audit and IS-BAO registration -- and then do what’s necessary to help them sustain that status indefinitely," he said.

Baldwin, who managed multi-national flight operations at both Texaco and Coca Cola during his career in aviation management, told ANN those roles actually contributed to his understanding and identification with small flight departments.

"At Texaco, we operated a large, multi-national flight department, but it included five satellite bases. A lot of the business concepts and insights we bring to our current relationships were developed there to support their smaller flight operations," he said. "At Coke, we were among the first flight operations in the world to qualify for IS-BAO registration, so we learned a great deal about what resources are essential to ensure safe operations, with continuity and consistency, in the face of inevitable changes in people and priorities."

"The shared services BAI provides are designed specifically to give our subscribers access to those resources without having to create them from scratch themselves," Baldwin noted.

FMI: www.baldwinaviation.com