RAeS Conference: Mental Wellbeing and Human Performance: Moving beyond Regulatory Compliance

Robert Courts MP was first elected as the Member of Parliament for Witney and West Oxfordshire in October 2016. In September 2020, he was appointed Parliamentary Under Secretary of State in the Department for Transport, with responsibility for aviation, maritime and security. He was previously Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to the Secretary of State for Transport, having served as a PPS in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office from January to July 2018 and to the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs from August 2019 until February 2020. Robert served on the International Trade Select Committee before becoming a Minister, having previously been a member of the Transport, Justice and Backbench Business Committees. A supporter of several groups in Parliament, Robert was Chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Small and Micro-businesses and founded the APPG for Community Transport. He was also the Vice-Chair (RAF) of the APPG for the Armed Forces, the APPG for Aerospace, the APPG for Dementia, and the APPG for Cycling. Before his election to Parliament, Robert was a self-employed barrister for some twelve years. His practice focused primarily on personal injury and clinical negligence. He also served as a District Councillor and is a graduate of the Royal College of Defence Studies and a member of the Air League Council. 

Marc Atherton MRAES is an aviation psychologist with a background in assessment, stress management, wellbeing and organisational change. He chairs the recently formed RAeS HF Wellbeing Specialist Group. In early 2020, as the pandemic took hold, he was one of the team that wrote and published the Flight Safety Foundation’s ‘An Aviation Professional’s Guide to Wellbeing’, and more recently has been part of the team that created the EASA Wellbeing Resource Hub. Marc is committed to ensuring that as the industry re-opens the psychological wellbeing of its staff, across all the parts of the industry, is a central element of civil aviation in the twenty first century.

Anna Vereker has been the Human Factors Programme Specialist at the UK CAA since May 2018. Previously she served as a Psychology Officer with the Royal New Zealand Air Force and worked with the NATS Human Factors team in Scotland. Anna is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist with endorsements for Psychometric Test Use and European work (EuroPsy). She is accredited as an Aviation Psychologist with the European Association of Aviation Psychologists and has worked in Aviation Psychology and Human Factors for more than a decade. She maintains memberships with a variety of Industry bodies such as the RAeS, CIEHF and BPS.

Karen Moore is a Chartered Occupational Pyschologist with considerable experience of assessing individuals at all levels from graduate to board directors and in a diverse range of industries from nuclear, through utilities to banking and aviation. She is particularly concerned that personality profiling should not be seen as the route to protecting mental health, but as one indicator of the individual’s susceptibility. Karen joined Symbiotics in 2017 as MD and Principal Occupational Psychologist, to further develop their assessment processes for high consequence industries. Symbiotics specialize in the assessment of pilots and other roles within aviation.

Niven Phoenix is a 787 pilot and Founding Director of Kura Human Factors. Niven has a long history creating and running support programmes for pilots. As a Royal Air Force (RAF) C17 Captain, he received an ‘Air Officer Commanding 2 Group’ Commendation in the 2011 Queens Birthday Honours List for his TRIM (trauma & risk management) work on 99 Squadron at the height of the Afghanistan Campaign. He represented the RAF in the Channel 4 Cutting Edge Documentary ‘Air Hospital’ and was one of the first Civil Aviation Peers in the UK. Crucially, he is passionate about flight safety and the protection of pilots. After losing his RUC officer father, Det Supt Ian Phoenix, in the 1994 RAF Chinook accident on the Mull of Kintyre, Niven and his family were instrumental in supporting the campaign to clear the pilots’ names from an erroneous claim of Gross Negligence.

David Whiffin is the Managing Director of OdiliaClark, a company specialising in independent workplace impairment testing. In 2019, OdiliaClark partnered with Dräger in response to customer demand for a policy-driven substance management service. OdiliaClark supports clients across highly regulated, high consequence sectors. David’s 20-year career in Aviation began as a REME Aircraft Engineer before working in the private sector leading the international manufacture of A380 doors. Using his business experience with Airbus and Rolls-Royce, David is driving change within the unregulated industry of workplace impairment testing. David is a Non-Executive Director for the Midlands Aerospace Alliance and holds an MBA.

Dr Joan Cahill is a Research Fellow and Principal Investigator at the Centre for Innovation in Human Systems (CIHS), at the School of Psychology, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. Joan’s research is at the nexus of people, information/technology and process delivery and focuses on technology-based supports and interventions in healthcare, aviation and transport. Joan is passionate about human factors and specifically technology interventions that are ethical and prioritise human value and wellbeing, along with positively impacting on society.

Captain Paul Cullen has been an airline pilot for over 22 years, and has accumulated over 14,000 hours flying the A320, A330 and B737. Paul is an IFALPA accredited Air Accident Investigator, and previously held the position of Director of Safety & Technical with the Irish Air Line Pilots Association. His interest in the mental health of pilots was borne out of interactions with pilots who had sought assistance. Paul has been a Research Associate with the Centre for Innovative Human Systems (CIHS) and the School of Psychology at Trinity College Dublin since 2018.

Jóhann Wium is the aviation psychologist for Isavia ANS, Iceland’s air navigation service provider (BIRD). He holds a graduate degree in industrial/organisational psychology, is a chartered psychologist with the British Psychological Society and an accredited Aviation Psychologist by the European Association of Aviation Psychology (EAAP). He is part of the working group that will publish EAAP’s recommendations on best practices for the psychological assessment and selection of pilots, air traffic controllers and other aviation personnel.

Tomas Klemets is Head of Scheduling Safety at Jeppesen, and has more than 20 years of experience working with the crew management process with operators world-wide. He is an expert in the airline crew rostering process, which is, for all larger operators, a highly automated one that utilizes expert systems with optimisation technology to address several different objectives of the airline simultaneously.

Paul Reuter is currently a Captain on the Boeing 737-700 and -800 for Luxair, which he joined in 1996. Until 2018 a Director, Technical Affairs for the European Cockpit Association, he is currently the chairman of EPPSI, the European Pilot Peer Support Initiative. He has been a member of the EASA Germanwings Task Force and is a member of the Steering Board of EASA’s Data4Safety initiative. Paul is also involved in the Just Culture aspects of Safety Management and he is an IFALPA Accredited Aviation Accident Investigator.

Paul Dickens BA(Cons) MPhil AFBPsS CPsychol FRAeS is a Registered Clinical Psychologist and an Accredited Aviation Psychologist providing aviation psychological services to fixed and rotary wing AOCs in the Uk, Europe and Canada. He specialises in pilot psychological assessment and providing mental health awareness training to pilots. Paul also supports a number of airline pilot peer support programmes as the mental health professional.

Gerard Forlin QC is the first lawyer to receive the IIRSM President’s Commendation at the Risk Excellence Awards. The award recognises Gerard’s contribution to the advancement of risk management through his vast legal expertise which, over the past 37 years, has included civil, criminal and commercial litigation as well as consultancy in the areas of health and safety (H&S), corporate governance and manslaughter, disaster, regulatory offences, product liability, bribery and corruption as well as major event planning and crowd safety. He has acted or advised on more than 250 fatality cases, including public inquiries into major UK rail crashes, and acted on some of the most high-profile regulatory and H&S cases in the last 10 years, both in the UK and internationally, including the Grenfell Tower inquiry, Alton Towers, Shoreham Air disaster and the Malaysian Airlines aviation disaster case in Asia. As a result of this expertise he’s in demand around the world and is one of the few UK barristers to have worked in more than 65 countries, standing counsel to numerous PLCs and other organisations, as well as lecturing abroad on behalf of the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the United Nations and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) on bribery and corruption. Gerard was educated at Trinity Hall Cambridge, LSE and UCL and has worked in Aviation for over 35 years including Airlines, Airports, Manufacturers, Regulators and Individuals.