Safety Day 2012 -An Update- As mentioned in the previous E-Safety Newsletters, all units must complete the National required safety day in Jan, Feb or March. Many units have completed their Safety Day training for this year. There are several items needed for this requirement. First, this training takes the place the October Safety Day. It was changed to these three months to avoid conflict during our normally busy month of October. It involves dedicating a meeting to discussing safety items that pertain to your unit and operations. Once completed the unit safety officer or commander inputs the data into e-services just like any safety meeting. What is important is that under name of training it must state "Annual Unit Safety Day" as the title. If you have a member attend another unit's Safety Day, make sure that the unit visited records your member on their attendance sheet. That will automatically record your member on your roster as completed the training. If a member misses the annual training, the unit will suspend the member until he can make up the missed day. And that is it. I have noticed that a few units have failed to input their Safety Day meeting into e-services. Well it isn't too late to do it, so do it now. Just follow the directions above and put in the date that you completed the requirement. It is the commander's responsibility to see that this is done.
Member's Duties in Safety - Each member is responsible for maintain their safety currency. This may be accomplished by many methods that were discussed before in this publication and at Wing meetings. Bottom line is that you as a member may not participate in any CAP activity until the requirements are completed and recorded in e-services. If it isn't there, you cannot be involved in any activity except for the sole purpose of becoming current. It must be recorded on the National database before you may participate again in any activity.
Other than your unit meetings you may take the CAP on-line courses located in the safety pages of E-Services. If you are not current, you will be directed there automatically. Take only one course at a time per month, save the other courses for when you miss a meeting. Also available is the FAA Wings program, on-line seminars that are conducted by aviation experts and AOPA Air Safety Foundation courses. All of these courses will automatically be added to your safety report. In addition any DoD courses and or industry courses will be accepted with your commander's approval. However these must be manually entered into e-services by your unit safety officer or commander.
Commander's Duties in Safety Compliance: Commanders must verify that all members under their commander are safety compliant and those not compliant are not allowed to participate in any CAP activity. The commander should refer to the e-services information to determine compliance. A key concept is conducting a safety briefing before any activityand then inputting the data into e-services. The Wing commander and Wing Director of Safety have reminded the members of this National policy many times. The Unit and Group Commanders are expected to enforce this regulation.
Safety Bulletin Boards - Safety Bulletin Boards are required at every unit level. On this board you should have the Unit, Group, Wing, Region and National Safety Newsletters. Also on the board, any safety related material should be posted. For units that don't have a permanent dedicated meeting area, a portable board can be used and put out at each meeting. If you have CAP pilots and aircrew members assigned to your unit, a sign indicating the location of the Pilot's and Aircrew information material would be a good idea. Along the same idea, a vehicle operator's information folder or file would be a good idea also.
AOPA Safety Resources
A host of Web resources to make you a safer pilot - For those unit safety officers looking for alternate means for pilots who miss their monthly safety meetings, try these from AOPA.
SAFETY - Everyone is a Safety Officer!
