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:
While you might argue for one definition over others, for this article we will simply say that all of these terms mean:
Either way, these terms refer to mitigating a problem. During issue management when you identify a problem, you need to figure out how to fix it. When you decide upon a solution, you MUST thoroughly review your intended plan to ensure that it will be viable and performant once implemented. A best practice is to document that you have reviewed viability and document your justifications.
Here are six ways to evaluate and justify a risk control in aviation SMS.
The effectiveness of risk control is only one thing to take into account when evaluating and justifying a safety mitigation strategy.
Effectiveness means:
You want to make sure that your control:
It is a good practice to perform a hypothetical risk assessment on the issue in the scenario of this control already being implemented to prove that it is effective.
Every risk control you implement will have certain benefits and costs. The costs can be literal or figurative. Proposed risk control strategies should have benefits that outweigh the costs. It is a good practice to actually document these costs and benefits to prove that it provides more benefits than costs to your SMS.
For example, consider this hypothetical list of costs and benefits of implementing a new hazard reporting system to improve hazard reporting.
Pros:
Cons:
When looking at this list, you can then provide a summary statement of:
Hopefully, practicality is a pretty easy thing to access. Mostly, when analyzing practicality you should be looking for a control’s practicality in terms of:
The list goes on. You should have established means and questions for deciding how practical the control is.
In this case, “Acceptable” refers to your stakeholder. This is another way of saying, will this control conflict with existing norms? This kind of bleeds into “How practical is your risk control,” but is important enough to require a separate evaluation and justification.
The long and short is that if you expect considerable resistance from stakeholders, the control likely is not acceptable. Ideally, you want a control that works well given your existing operations and safety culture.
Residual risk is simply a risk that is left over once the control is implemented. In reality, this is just a complicated way of asking you to assess:
Sometimes, one risk control by itself may be okay but will perform substantially better in conjunction with another control.
Lastly, you need to evaluate whether or not the control will introduce any other hazards or risks into your operations. If implementing a new control will suddenly introduce two new risks, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to fix one risk and introduce two new ones.
It’s good to perform some predictive analysis activities on your risk control to assess whether or not new risks will be introduced.
Last updated October 2024.