Depending on the context and your educational background, safety risk management in aviation safety management systems (SMS) can mean a couple of different things:
In both instances, the objectives remain the same, which ensures that risks surrounding safe operations are controlled.
When the risk is not controlled, there is an increased chance that the operator will suffer consequences from an uncontrolled event. In most cases, these events will be minor and cause slight disruptions in business. However, the potential for a major event with fatalities must be accounted for, to ensure the public does not lose confidence in the safety of the "aviation system."
In this article, we will not center the discussion on the four pillars of an aviation SMS but on the second instance, where we explore the processes to identify and manage operational hazards and risks.
The most important things safety managers need to understand about what Safety Risk Management (SRM) is, is that SRM is a process. This process is cyclical and broken down into several stages.
Different oversight agencies account for these stages differently, but the international themes of SRM are:
The above SRM elements receive considerable attention. However, other, more subtle SRM elements are either hastily skimmed over or overlooked entirely. These subcomponents of SRM are extremely important because they determine the quality of your SRM process and will influence how much “value” you get out of the above-mentioned bullet points.
These sub-elements of SRM are things like:
These activities are perhaps the most important activities in Safety Risk Management (SRM), as they strongly influence all SRM operations.
Quite often, we see disagreement regarding the definitions of likelihood and severity in aviation risk management. This arises because of differing educational levels, backgrounds, and opinions about:
The most commonly accepted opinions are:
However, these definitions are not set in stone. Some companies accept hazards as being non-dangerous “things” that can become dangerous, and a risk as a dangerous condition. This definition tends to feel more natural and cause less confusion but can be at odds with definitions of oversight agencies (such as the FAA).
Based on those definitions, your organization should decide what likelihood and severity are addressed.
Regardless of your viewpoints regarding these basic risk management definitions, your organization needs to be crystal clear about what a hazard is and what a risk is. Not only should everyone have a clear understanding of the relationship between a hazard and risk, but your definitions must align with your civil aviation authority. Everyone must be on the same page, otherwise, there will be considerable frustration and possible audit findings.
After aligning risk and hazard definitions, you need to:
Risk management processes in aviation SMS use risk matrices to easily and intuitively communicate risk among stakeholders with varying degrees of risk management expertise. The most common risk matrix is a 5x5, as illustrated on the right. Your risk matrix may look different than the one illustrated. For example, you may have only a 3x3 or 4x4 risk matrix, where numbers represent the number of cells along the x and y-axis.
There are no requirements to use a specific risk matrix in your aviation SMS. If you have not yet chosen a risk matrix, here is a word of advice: "Don't make a science out of it." If you are starting an SMS implementation, you probably don't have the time or experience to recreate the wheel," so keep it simple. Use the default 5x5 risk matrix.
Each level of severity and likelihood should have specific “markers” to represent the different gradation between probability and severity axes. For example, level 3 severity might be defined by having:
The goal is that based on how you define what constitutes severity/likelihood, you can easily perform risk assessments with each reported safety issue and be:
An aviation SMS' Safety Assurance (SA) processes and Safety Risk Management (SRM) activities are intimately connected. When hazards and/or risks are adequately controlled, they will need to be monitored in the SA process to provide "assurance" that risk is managed appropriately. This sounds straightforward enough; however “adequately controlled” is a muddy and subjective phrase.
By adequately controlled, what we are really talking about is whether the level of risk is “acceptable.” But what is acceptable? Oversight agencies and organizations handle this by requiring the organizations to define what acceptable is, based on the risk assessment.
This makes a lot more sense than making a “case by case” judgment about whether a particular issue is acceptably controlled. Assigning “acceptable” to a level of risk assessment:
If your organization isn’t extremely clear about what ALoS is for your organization, you can count on an audit finding against any one of your SRM process elements.
Where many aviation service providers get their SRM process right is by understanding the importance of identifying hazards. Where organizations go astray is not understanding that hazard identification is a process, not just a single activity. This process includes:
Many different activities are related to this risk management process, such as:
What’s important is that you understand your hazard identification process well enough to:
Oversight agencies provide guidance on what their expectations are for the SRM process. Most follow ICAO's guidance. If this guidance is vague or unclear, review ICAO’s Safety Management Manual for further SRM guidance.
Guidance aside, something we hear over and over is that above anything else, oversight agencies want:
For information about the FAA’s SRM requirements, see our 30+ page e-book covering in great detail exactly what the FAA expects from aviation service providers.
Last updated April 2024.