Change is an inevitable and constant reality in the aviation industry. A 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 ICAO-compliant SMS.
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
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.
Risk assessments use a risk matrix to create composite number/letter grades based on:
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Aviation SMS roles are used to organize different responsibilities in your aviation safety program. Each role in your SMS will have separate responsibilities. SMS roles are assigned to each of your employees.
You should develop roles at the very beginning of starting an SMS. Roles provide significant benefits by helping you:
Topics: Aviation SMS Implementation
Roles in aviation SMS are used to categorize different responsibilities of employees in your safety program. Each role in your SMS will be responsible for different areas of your SMS, including different duties to fulfill those responsibilities. SMS roles are assigned to each of your employees.
Safety Assurance in aviation SMS is a process that helps you ensure that your SMS is functioning as designed. Safety Assurance is most closely associated with Phase 4 of SMS implementation. Implementing Phase 4 largely involves implementing to:
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Aviation safety management systems (SMS) needs input from three levels of your organization to be successful. Without the total involvement of your company, hazard reporting will fail.
The three levels of your company and their corresponding responsibility for setting up a successful hazard reporting program are:
Topics: 4-Safety Promotion, Safety Culture
The idea of a safety management system (SMS) is something those of us in the aviation risk management industry use as if an SMS were one solid “thing.” But a safety management system is actually made up of multiple ideas, packaged into a single, functioning effort for better aviation safety.
These different ideas are found in its name:
Topics: 1-Safety Policy, Quality-Safety Management
Formally documenting your SMS means creating an “official” record of your SMS. Official records are simply aspects of your SMS that you document and save to use later, such as during review or provide to an auditor. Aspects of your SMS that you formally document will fall into two categories:
Topics: 1-Safety Policy
Proving the effectiveness of your aviation safety management system comes in several flavors. Who are you proving the effectiveness to? You might be showing your SMS effectiveness at managing safety to:
Employee participation in your aviation SMS is critical to its maintainability. We do this over and over, where the SMS is being pushed by one person and when that person leaves, the program falls apart.
One of the primary goals of generating good involvement is creating a sustainable SMS.
Participation is a word that is often lost on service providers.
Topics: Safety Culture
These two on-demand videos offer:
