Thoughts on safety

Mark McIlroy

14 September 2025



1. Some environments and activities are inherently dangerous. For example, manufacturing facilities, transport vehicles like aircraft, buses and trains.


2. Select the people that will be in or controlling these environments very carefully. People who have a happy-go-lucky attitude and treat life as a joke have no place in dangerous environments. They will injure or kill themselves, and possibly take someone else with them.


3. Be especially careful with young people because they are frequently reckless. Maturity comes with age.


4. Employers, managers, supervisors, staff, government regulators and industry associations all have important roles to play in ensuring safety.


5. All these groups should have regular meetings where the only topic of the meeting is a review of safety issues.


6. Equipment must be properly maintained.


7. It is my opinion that nature always gives a warning before something bad happens. In some cases there have been mutiple close calls before the actual accident happened, or the risk situation was quite obvious quite a while before the event.