The interdisciplinary nature of "safety" means that it has implications for most corporate management and government regulatory actions. This text is aimed at aviation safety management trainees, and aims to offer a practical and concise education supplement to the safety literature. Its central thesis is that safety is more than the absence of accidents. Safety is defined as the goal of transforming the levels of risk that are inherent in all human activity. In order to describe the forward-looking system safety approach, with its focus on accident prevention, the author classifies the transportation safety literature into distinct and apparently self-reinforcing "schools" of thought - tort law, reality engineering and system safety engineering. The book provides real-world practical illustrations of the theory, outlines the history, theory and practice of safety management and aims to stimulate interdisciplinary thinking about safety.