"Baines Simmons - born out of an ambition to advance aviation safety"

It is with great pride that I write these few words to reflect and celebrate Baines Simmons' tenth anniversary of successfully contributing to the world of aviation safety.

I would like to express my thanks to our customers - for your continuing trust, confidence and loyalty to engage our services. We continually receive feedback from you about the positive impact and sometimes life-changing effect our services and consultants make to you and your safety programmes.

Over the last 10 years we have broadened our solutions and services and are now recognised as a highly successful consulting and training organisation with considerable proven expertise. We have continually re-invested in new safety thinking, new safety services and new safety tools that have helped make us to be a world class market leader. During this same time we have also seen our clients' appetite and demand to invest in safety enhancements grow. Ten years on, we still remain consistent to our initial ethos - ‘to inspire advances in safety thinking and competence through the practical application and understanding of complex aviation regulation’.

The sentiment ‘safety is both our profession and our passion‘ continues to echo loudly within the Baines Simmons' company philosophy. We have successfully attracted and developed an impressive team of similar-minded, professional-thinking consultants that share our initial ambition to ‘make a difference’ with our clients' safety. Today, we are one of the largest independent aviation safety improvement organisations in the world. We have many great people who regularly contribute to industry thinking and emergent regulation. I am proud to say that several of our team have received industry recognition awards for their contribution towards aviation safety.

The next ten years

As we look to the future, the issues of safety grow even more complicated. The trends to busier skies, increased aircraft complexity, low cost competition and risk-based regulatory approaches all add to tomorrow's safety challenge. Baines Simmons' safety programmes are designed to respond to these issues by engaging at all levels in client organisations, inspiring people through new insights, better skills, best practice and latest safety learning. Our strategic, management and technical support levels are aimed to help you enhance your safety performance through strategies that drive safety management, leadership, competence, capability and compliance.

We view the next ten years as being very exciting for aviation safety professionals in their quest to drive forward strategic and operational safety performance enhancements. The challenge lies in making safety management systems more proactive to support risk-based business decision making. This will need to be achieved through the right safety cultures and the creation of safety intelligence gathered from the organisation's own risk-derived safety data.

So, in concluding, we have been fortunate to build lots of good relationships over the last ten years and make many friends. We enthusiastically look forward to the opportunity of working closely with you over the next ten years, responding to fresh challenges and making an even bigger difference to aviation safety. Thank you once again for your continued support. We hope to see you in May 2012 at this year’s exciting Baines Simmons sponsored Third European Safety Management Symposium ‘A Business Approach to Safety’ where some very interesting speakers will stimulate our thoughts.

Andrew J Parker
Chairman, Baines Simmons