The basic fact is that truly judging the effectiveness of aviation safety management systems (SMS) is tough.
To merely judge the effectiveness of a program based on how well it meets compliance sounds prescriptive at best.
Judging a program based on a number of incidents and other such numeric data is terribly inadequate. It doesn’t take into account so many other factors that can reveal an SMS' health, such as:
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
As I’ve discussed before, “safety culture” gets thrown around rather loosely in the aviation industry.
"Safety culture" is the kind of thing that is vitally important, but so undernourished in terms of actually discussing what it means and what it looks like, that you sort of roll your eyes and with a wink and a nod say, “Oh yea... safety culture.”
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
Underlying causes in aviation safety management systems (SMS) are the bridge between reactive and proactive risk management.
Underlying causes are the “input” for safety issues because they reinforce the actions and behaviors that cause incidents to happen.
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
How aviation safety managers conduct oversight is extremely important for the success or failure of the aviation safety management system (SMS).
The particular management style of a safety manager determines how willingly employees will interact with aviation SMS. Will they sincerely accept the demands placed on them by the SMS? Or will they rebel silently and look for ways to subvert the SMS?
What kind of style do you use as a safety manager?
Topics: Quality-Safety Management
Different organizations will have different requirements when they review safety issues. Whether or not you are reviewing low-risk issues is up to you. While we recommend reviewing all issues, the reality is that due to time and resource constraints, this is not always feasible.
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
The actions employees take immediately in response to an emergency will greatly affect the outcome of the emergency. In such situations, employees’ actions may largely be the deciding factor between catastrophic consequences and a scary but benign outcome.
Consequences can be
Topics: Quality-Safety Management
Plan Do Check Act is a simple but effective process to use when implementing risk controls through corrective-preventative actions. The PDCA process is initiated after you discover some deficiency/weakness in your SMS that poses an unacceptable level of safety, such as after an aviation SMS audit, reported safety concern, or trend analysis.
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
If you want to practice reactive, proactive, and predictive risk management in aviation safety management systems (SMS), you first and foremost need to understand the difference between these types of risk management in modern aviation operations.
Understanding what each type of risk management is does not involve just understanding the “conceptual” difference, but how each practice differs in the actual operational environment.
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
The Safety Risk Management process (SRM) is where you outline and document your entire operational risk profile. Completing your SRM process is a major part of Phase 3 of SMS implementation.
Once you complete the initial documentation of your SRM process, you will need to continuously update it as new “inputs” are identified or implemented in your SMS,
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
Knowing best practices for hazard reporting in aviation safety management systems (SMS) is an attempt to better attain the goals of hazard reporting.
What are the goals of hazard reporting?
There are three main objectives:
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
These two on-demand videos offer:
