This week I attended a Aviation Safety Meeting at HOU. These type of meetings are offered all over the United States from time to time. They are usually free, or have a small entry fee. Has anyone here ever attended any of these kind of meetings?

I was thinking that for someone with an interest in aviation or thinking about getting their pilots license these would be great to attend. They usually have industry leaders attending and making interesting presentations. And they go over things like SMS (Safety Managed Systems), CRM (Cockpit Resource Management) and review aircraft incidents and cover why the incident happened in the first place. In the meeting I attended they had a nice segment on hangar safety as well. Usually each segment is 30-45 minutes long so it doesn't get too boring. It's also nice to have access to local and national level FAA managers.

At the one I attended, Flightaware had their people there. One thing I noticed is how generally interested the vendors are in reaching out to the local aviation community. Embraer even had their new Phenom jet on display as well (one hot aircraft!).

I believe these meetings also give you an insight as to what actually makes a safe operation and what goes into getting an airplane from point A to B safely.

The meeting I attended was put on by the Houston Aviation Alliance and the National Business Aviation Association with quite a number of major vendors attending.