When you perform risk analysis on a safety issue in aviation SMS, your goal is to understand how and why the issue effects exposure in your organization. Understanding how and why an issue effects exposure is the logical step that leads to being able assess how much it affects exposure.
Topics: Risk Management Training
In aviation SMS, you analyze risk in order to break in issue down into individual, controllable parts. Based off of your analysis, you can assess the safety issue, and understand both what actions need to be taken, and what safety factors need to be better controlled.
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Top management requires that all personnel must participate in the safety management system (SMS) program. Wishes and reality are two different ideas and the reality is that most employees don't care about the company's safety program.
Management needs tools to offer assurance that "employees are actually involved in their SMS program."
The Logins By Division chart is an extremely valuable tool for assessing which employee segments are participating in the safety program, and which sections are not. The precondition of this chart is that safety programs have aviation safety software or computer server that can track user activity.
Also, divisions are simply how an organization segments users in its SMS program. Divisions are commonly different departments or different organizational locations. For more information about division in a safety program, see our blog article that discusses what divisions are in aviation SMS.
Topics: Risk Management Software
Before making risk assessments, there are a number of important questions to ask about the issue in question. These questions are extremely important, as they affect how you will rank the issue and how you will respond to it.
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
Change is an inevitable and constant reality in the aviation industry. In fact, lack of change is tantamount to a lack of growth in an economy. Likewise, if your aviation safety management system (SMS) is not changing, it’s not improving. "Continuous improvement of the SMS" is the third element of the "Safety Assurance" pillar of SMS.
But let’s face it, managing change can be tough because most of us dislike change.
Moreover, it’s too easy to make the changes the wrong way – not the wrong changes, just changes that only act as a catalyst for resistance – and people seem to be ready to grumble over changes.
What’s worse, as the one driving the changes, you, as the safety manager, are in the hot seat.
Overcoming resistance to changes in the aviation industry doesn’t have to be fraught with peril.
Here are 7 ways for aviation safety managers to ease the pain:
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
A risk control process for an aviation safety management system (SMS) entails a series of risk management tasks that are executed whenever:
The risk control process offers a step of repeatable tasks to bring risk to ALARP (as low as reasonably practical). These risk management tasks may not always be sequential, meaning that some tasks may be worked on simultaneously or some tasks may have to be repeated.
What follows are some best practices to consider when developing or reviewing your aviation safety management systems risk control processes and optimizing the information flow to the rest of the organization.
Topics: Aviation SMS Implementation
Every aviation operation endures varying levels of risk, depending on ever-changing environmental conditions.
The operating environment never remains constant.
No two operations are identical.
Certain factors will always interject uncertainty and risk into the operation, including:
There are times when pilots and maintenance personnel need to determine in advance whether the operation they are about to undertake involves inordinately high levels of risk. Aviation service providers should deem it critical for both asset protection and risk management best practices to establish a review process for certain types of operations.
Here we'll explore the benefits of proactively identifying hazards and why many managers don't like to incorporate flight risk assessments into their daily operations.
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
Safety managers are busy people. After all, they are constantly ensuring documentation is appropriately managed for the four pillars of the aviation SMS.
It's easy to let something slip by if there are no mechanisms in place for quality assurance for your aviation safety program.
What does it mean by reviewing the aviation safety policy? How is this done? Do I just slap another date on the bottom? What do auditors look for when reviewing this requirement? These are a few questions we'll seek to answer. Also, we will provide a free checklist for you to either:
Topics: 1-Safety Policy
A risk assessment is a method you use to rank the risk of safety issues. You will commonly perform risk assessments on reported safety issues and other identified hazards. Assessments are integral to helping you establish whether or not a given issue is within an Acceptable Level of Safety.
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Aviation safety managers are faced with particular challenges stemming from:
The problem stems from safety managers not speaking the same language as upper-level executives. Imagine dogs trying to communicate with cats.
That is right, aviation safety managers are a different species than upper management.
It is not by accident that one of the first steps in implementing an aviation safety management system (SMS) is to acquire top management support. This has repeatedly been proven as a critical step in every successful SMS! Your SMS program will not survive without it.
In this post, we'll explore some tips to earn or maintain support for your SMS and perhaps increase your aviation safety budget.
Topics: Aviation SMS Implementation
These two on-demand videos offer:
