Safety
Bombardier Safety Standdown 2012
Rick Rowe, Bombardier’s manager of safety stand-downs, addresses an audience of approximately 400 pilots at the Wichita event.
Rick Rowe, Bombardier’s manager of safety stand-downs, addresses an audience of approximately 400 pilots at the Wichita event.

By all accounts, the 1996 genesis of Bombardier’s Safety Standdown, an event that now regularly draws nearly 500 aviators to Wichita annually, was rather humble. Bob Agostino, director of Bombardier’s Flight Operations at the time and a trained accident investigator, asked his pilots for their thoughts after a particularly difficult accident investigation. One of them, Air Force veteran Dave Sullivan, explained how the military dealt with similar issues. “We’d stand down until we figured out the cause.” Agostino wondered, “Why wait for another accident before we look into what causes them?” A few months later the first standdown was launched as an internal training tool for Bombardier’s seven-pilot Wichita flight department.