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.
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.
Topics: Safety Culture
A risk matrix is a tool you will use to assess safety concerns. The matrix allows you to rank risk and provide visual cues on safety acceptability.
The risk matrix is a standard tool for assessing safety issues in aviation SMS and is recommended by ICAO and other regulatory authorities for assessing issues.
You should develop your risk matrix at the onset of managing reported issues. It involves:
Topics: Aviation SMS Implementation
ICAO’s hazard identification compliance requirements are twofold:
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Grab a spare pen and paper so you can write down some notes. What we are looking for is a total score. It works like this:
Topics: Safety Culture
If there is one thing all aviation compliance authority guidelines (including ICAO) agree upon, it’s that your aviation safety mitigation controls need to be thoroughly analyzed BEFORE you implement them.
Safety mitigation controls are the bedrock of your risk mitigation strategy.
Safety mitigation controls are also commonly called:
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Confidentiality in aviation SMS refers to how much personal information should be made available to your organization. By personal information, we are mainly talking about personal information in safety reports, such as people involved or the name of the reporter.
When safety issues are reported, employees may or may not have access to details about the reported issue.
Topics: Safety Culture
Element 2.2 of ICAO’s requirements is for you to develop and maintain a process to:
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
These two on-demand videos offer:
