SMS Pro Aviation Safety Software Blog 4 Airlines & Airports

Quality Leadership Stimulates Teamwork

These challenges to harmonious work-relationships make the treatment of this subject more difficult. You will not find easy, cut and dry answers to address most teamwork and communication challenges.

Regulatory Phrases May Pack an Incredible Punch

When I was in school, both high school and college, English composition professors would frequently remark on my ability to use very few words to say a lot.

It Only Takes One

You know the old expression: it only takes one to poison the well.

We end up writing a lot about resistance to change in aviation safety management systems (SMS) because it’s something many aviation safety managers consistently deal with.

Resistance to the SMS should never be taken lightly; however, dealing with resistance requires tact and ingenuity in order to avoid exacerbating the resistance.

What Is Risk Assessment in SMS

Risk Assessments in aviation safety management systems (SMS) are how you qualify, quantify, and rank risk exposure for:

• Reported safety issues;
• Audit findings and concerns; and
• Risk scenarios (consequences) associated with identified hazards.

Risk assessments are absolutely central to decision making in SMS, as all actions performed on the safety issue depend on the initial and subsequent risk assessments. Risk assessments are based on your risk matrix. How well you define your risk matrix sets the stage for critical safety events in your risk management processes.

How do you define your risk matrix? What problems will an ill-suited risk matrix cause you?

Managers Drive Employee Actions Toward Safety Programs

I am guessing that every accountable executive you speak to will honestly profess to support their aviation safety management system (SMS). After all, the alternative would be that top management only cares about making money and not doing everything reasonably practical to improve safety.

Proactive Risk Management a Dream for Many Aviation Safety Programs

Historically, aviation safety management strategies relied predominantly upon reactive risk management principles. For example, a critical part would break or an accident occurred, and managers would then attempt to determine the root cause and fix the issue.

In a perfect world, aviation service providers will lean toward a more modern proactive, organizational-based methodology to avert serious accidents before they occur. By looking at Boeing stats, commercial traffic is very safe, with greater than 99.999% accident-free rate.

Creating a System of Organization

Even smaller aviation SMSs are still a leviathan of policies, procedures, documents, reports, and so on. A disorganized aviation safety manager will slowly kill an aviation SMS every time.

Safety Assurance Monitoring Activities - Third ICAO SMS Pillar

Why Knowing Who Is Reporting Hazards Is Important

Monitoring which groups of employees are reporting issues in your aviation safety management system (SMS) allows management to stay abreast of who is involved in the SMS.

Alternatively, knowing which employees are neglecting to report hazards is also useful information to SMS professionals. This would indicate that safety promotion efforts or SMS training efforts need to be reinforced.

In short, we are most interested in which particular user groups are not fulfilling their responsibilities to the SMS. These employees introduce unnecessary risk to aviation operations.

How do you know which employee groups are not participating in the SMS? Can you determine this easily? We have some ideas to stimulate your SMS.

Not So Obvious