ICAO’s hazard identification compliance requirements are twofold:
Being compliant with these requirements involves, like anything else in SMS, doing and documenting. You need to document your process and how you use various risk management techniques for hazard identification, and you need to follow through.
Let’s break down these requirements piece by piece for how to be compliant with ICAO hazard identification.
Hazard identification in aviation SMS programs is the primary data you will use to mitigate risks. With hazard identification, you identify the safety needs of your company and can act accordingly. It is part of the Safety Risk Management element of the 4 Pillars of aviation safety.
Hazard identification is simply awareness and recognition of potential danger in the operational environment. Hazards can be identified by different activities, such as:
ICAO actually mandates that your SMS attempts to identify hazards with all three types of risk management. All identified hazards should be documented in your hazard risk register and/or operational risk profile, where you can also document how you are mitigating the threat each hazard poses.
Hazards are one of the core concerns of the safety management system. A hazard fulfills the following requirements:
It’s quite common for safety managers to confuse hazards with other risk management principles. A hazard is NOT:
What can and may differ from organization to organization is how each organization defines the point where a situation becomes unacceptably dangerous.
In aviation SMS programs, ICAO mandates that your hazard identification process needs to be “formal.” A formal process means that hazard identification processes need to be:
Hazard identification processes should be based on a combination of reactive, proactive, and predictive methods of safety data collection.
The reason it’s important to understand hazard identification as a process is because identifying hazards happens as a result of several actions, each of which has several steps. These basic steps are:
Your documented process for hazard identification should try and reflect these basic steps.
Reactive risk management has kind of a bad reputation in aviation SMS programs. It’s often perceived as the “lowest” or most basic form of risk management.
Reactive risk management is an extremely important way to identify hazards. Indeed, you may identify a majority of your hazards via reactive processes. This is because reactive risk management is an essential element of:
Reactive risk management is how personnel see danger and react appropriately to it. This involves documenting:
These documentation elements will show how you promote reactive hazard identification.
Proactive risk management is something aviation safety programs strive for. Being able to identify hazards proactively is good for safety and good for compliance performance.
The primary goals of proactive hazard identification are:
Being able to identify hazards proactively usually involves activities like:
The goal of such activities is to identify problems before they actually pose a real danger. Being compliant means:
Predictive risk management attempts to:
Predictive hazard identification simply means performing predictive risk management operations with the goal of identifying hazards. The way to actually practice this is to document how your various predictive processes include hazard identification, such as how findings will be integrated into your issue management system.
Last updated in May 2024.