Airport ground handling staff face a number of risks to their personal health and safety. Anything that can be done to lessen these risks will help to boost morale, reduce absenteeism, and generally improve the effectiveness of the airport.
As well as being ethically desirable, providing a safe working environment for employees is a legal duty for airport operators, much as it is for any other employer. This means assessing the risks and implementing practices which minimise them. It’s not just employers that need to act, however – airport ground handling workers might also take the initiative and take responsibility for their own safety.
Let’s run through a few essential safety tips for workers to bear in mind.
Appropriate clothes
When you’re working on a runway, it’s essential that people are able to see where you are. This matters not just because of the heavy machinery involved in this industry, but for basic productivity reasons, too. Being able to perform a rough head-count, and pass on instructions easily, can be very useful.
Premium-quality hi-viz vests are a simple, effective way of ensuring that everyone is kept visible, even in darkened airport conditions.
Metal and Physical health
This kind of work can be extremely challenging, especially if it’s disruptive to sleep patterns. Providing workers with education on good practices for sleeping, and offering them incentives to take care of themselves physically, can actually bolster productivity, and pay back the investment quickly.
Use Safety Tools
If you’re working in an airport, then you might find yourself faced with the constant barrage of noise from jet engines. Even if you’re only occasionally exposed to extreme volumes, the cumulative impact of all of this noise can be a loss of hearing. There’s a reliable way to offset this problem: provide hearing protection, and ensure that everyone is wearing it.
The take-off sound of a jet engine is around 115dbA, at a distance of ten metres. This is often enough to cause physical discomfort, and to seriously reduce hearing quality after just a few years. It’s easy to brush off these concerns – but the health consequences don’t go away.
Training
It might be that the airport is faced with an emergency situation. Should the need arise, it’s vital that workers are able to react swiftly and decisively. This means providing training and drilling for a range of circumstances. Through the right training, airport operators can instil a culture that’s vigilant and risk-conscious, which in turn will help to minimise the likelihood of an accident, and to lessen the impact of the accidents that do occur.
It’s unreasonable to expect individuals to act safely if the culture does not demand it. Put in place rules and enforce them, and provide training, and you’ll get compliance.
