One of the most ubiquitous problems in aviation risk management is the misuse of commonly used words, in particular “hazard” and “risk.” Often, these two items are either:
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
Control measures are the heart of your aviation safety management system’s (SMS) risk mitigation efforts. You may call your "control measures" either:
In this article, we'll use the term "control measures," but I am sure many of you call them "risk controls." Either term is permissible; however, I'm detecting a global preference in the aviation industry for the term "risk control."
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Repeat safety incidents are extremely indicative of management’s safety performance in mitigating safety concerns.
Having repeat safety incidents is clear evidence that management is “missing” or “overlooking” something when they are correcting reported safety concerns. This is bad for safety performance, and it’s bad for audit performance.
On the other hand, the lack of repeat incidents indicates that whatever you are doing to mitigate safety concerns, it’s working. The most important factors in mitigating safety concerns are:
Topics: Quality-Safety Management
If you put 10 safety managers in a room and asked them what root cause analysis was, they would have ten different answers.
Safety professionals all say that they perform root cause analysis at some time during their risk management process. In their minds, that’s probably true.
But root cause analysis for one safety manager would not necessarily be the root cause analysis for another manager.
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
During the risk management process in an aviation safety management system (SMS), one of the expected tasks is to analyze the risk of hazards associated with
When you perform risk analysis on whatever type of a safety issue in aviation SMS, your goal is to understand how and why the underlying issue affects risk exposure in your organization.
Topics: Risk Management Training
This article is originally inspired by a rather insightful video discussing the interplay between safety management and quality assurance.
A management system is a set of processes used to manage “findings” during operations.
“Findings” are simply things you discover in your operations that are less than ideal. We can also call findings “issues.” There can be many types of issues, such as:
Topics: Quality-Safety Management
Accuracy is extremely important.
Much of the bureaucracy of safety management systems depend on correct and specific understanding of safety concepts. Misunderstanding definitions in SMS is synonymous with misunderstanding what a safety element is and can compromise how that safety element is:
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
“Safety culture” is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in aviation safety management systems (SMS) as a vague reference to different aspects of safety.
Understanding the meaning of aviation safety culture is less practiced in philosophy as it is recognition of what it looks like in actual practice for:
Topics: 4-Safety Promotion
The line between reactive and proactive safety workplaces is unfortunately not as concrete as anyone would like. If it were so obvious, many organizations would be far less reactive. The fact is that most cultures are less proactive than they would like to be.
Granted, there are some obvious indicators that an organization is only responding to accidents rather than actively trying to prevent them.
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Last year my wife went to the dentist to have a filling put into one of her teeth. She had severe pain for several days, went back to the dentist, and found out that he had put the filling in backward. He replaced it with a new filling but the next day it fell out of her tooth.
We chose a different dentist this time around.
Topics: 4-Safety Promotion
These two on-demand videos offer:
