Definition

The Ramp Event Decision Aid (REDA) tool is a structured process used to investigate events caused by ramp worker performance.

Background and Description

The Boeing Company developed the Maintenance Event Decision Aid (MEDA), originally the Maintenance Error Decision Aid, tool with active involvement with airlines and the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). In 1995 MEDA was made available to Boeing's all airline customers as part of its plan to improve safety. Since that time, MEDA has become an industry standard for maintenance event investigation. MEDA has helped to shift safety culture from blaming maintenance personnel for making errors to systematically investigating events to understand contributing factors.

Based on MEDA's success, Boeing expanded the tool to ramp operations and created a sister program, Ramp Event Decision Aid (REDA) in the late 1990s.

The ramp system is composed of all the organizations, equipment, facilities, personnel, and information involved in safely receiving, servicing, maintaining, and dispatching commercial transport aircraft in the ramp environment. One or more components in the system may fail during the process of receiving, unloading, servicing, maintaining, uploading, and dispatching aircraft in the ramp (apron) environment. REDA is a way for an organization to learn from its mistakes. Over the past several years, the industry has moved away from calling REDA an "error" investigation process to calling it an "event" investigation process. The reason for this is that it has become increasingly clear that events caused by ramp worker performance can contain both an error component as well as a component involving noncompliance with regulations, policies, processes, and/or procedures. This noncompliance will be referred to as a "violation" in the remainder of this article.

Ramp errors and violations are a result of contributing factors in the workplace. In many cases, other ramp workers confronted with the same contributing factors might well make the same error or violation that led to the event. It is estimated that 80 to 90 percent of the contributing factors to errors/violations are under management control, while the remaining 10 to 20 percent are under the control of the ramp worker. Therefore, management can make changes to reduce or eliminate most contributing factors to an error or violation and thereby reduce the probability of future similar events.

The REDA program is like the MEDA process but is for investigating ramp events, such as aircraft or equipment damage and personal injuries during ramp operations. Two Boeing-copyrighted REDA tools are available to the public. The first is the REDA User's Guide, which is a "how-to" manual on carrying out a REDA investigation. The second is the REDA Results Form, which is used to collect contributing factors information from interviews with the ramp staff who performed the ramp tasks or saw the work being done.