Enhancing Aviation Safety: Expert Insights, Tips, and Updates from SMS-Pro

High Stakes

Passing aviation safety audits is absolutely critical for safety managers, not to mention the accountable executive who is ultimately responsible for aviation safety management systems (SMS) performance.

Why Understand the Stages of Safety Events?

Understanding the fine lines between various stages of safety events in aviation risk management processes is extremely important.

What Is an Aviation Safety Manager in an SMS Program?

The aviation safety manager (SM) is the individual charged with developing, monitoring, and improving the safety management system (SMS) of the service provider.

What Is the Hazard Reporting Process

Simply put, the hazard reporting process is the primary mode of data acquisition in aviation safety management systems (SMS). Being such, a poor hazard reporting process can literally break your SMS. If that sounds unrealistic, it’s not.

What Is an Internal Aviation SMS Audit

An internal aviation safety management system (SMS) audit is a process you use to verify that certain actions are taking place in your SMS.

Audits are a safety assurance activity that is most commonly used to broadly assess whether or not aviation service providers can demonstrate continuous improvement of the SMS.

That being said, you might have different auditing processes for assessing different aspects of your SMS, such as:

Understand What Is Proactive Risk Management

Proactive safety management is often upheld as the second highest form of risk management after "predictive risk management." This is because being able to demonstrate proactive risk management activities generally does not happen until an aviation safety management system (SMS) matures beyond Phase 2.

What Is an Internal Aviation SMS Audit

An internal aviation SMS audit is how you evaluate any part of your SMS.

On the one hand, you use such audits to ensure that certain actions are taking place in your SMS, such as SRM operations or continuous improvement.

What Are the Top 5 KPIs in Aviation Safety

We recently analyzed the key performance indicators (KPIs) of hundreds of aviation service providers around the globe, and used our data to assess what the most common KPI concerns are for the aviation industry.

Importance of Risk Level Breakdown in Aviation SMS

Simple safety charts often speak volumes.

A group of simple, yet related, safety charts evolves nicely into a performance monitoring dashboard.

Interesting Discussion on Audits vs. Inspections

The other day, I had a rather interesting discussion with a couple of seasoned aviation safety managers on the topic of aviation safety audits vs inspections.

It took a while to come to a consensus about the primary differences, as well as the ideological implications of each.