As airlines and the aviation industry, in general, continue to eclipse safety records year by year, a nagging question begins to crop up with increasing vigor:
To what end?
The thought of endless safety improvement is daunting for any aviation safety manager. Endless improvement is totally unrealistic, though it often feels like the pressure from up top is to strive for just that – an impossible goal.
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
Lagging indicators are an essential element of system performance monitoring in aviation safety management systems (SMS). Safety professionals and accountable executives should become familiar with lagging indicators as these managers are responsible for regularly reviewing organizational safety performance and detecting substandard safety performance.
Lagging indicators show the historical performance of your aviation SMS implementation. They answer 3 essential questions about safety in your risk management program:
Topics: Key Performance Indicators
Workers’ participation in aviation safety management systems (SMS) comes down to one word: reporting.
When workers are reporting, it demonstrates three things:
But as we are well aware, creating a hazard reporting culture has several powerful enemies, namely
Topics: 4-Safety Promotion
Safety performance monitoring is an essential component of aviation safety management systems (SMS). And by “essential,” performance monitoring is like your SMS implementation's immune system.
When performance monitoring is not handled well, your safety program will wither. Worse yet, your operating certificate may be in jeopardy.
Do you know what performance monitoring looks like?
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Proving to stakeholders that your aviation safety management system is working is simply a matter of showing that the primary goal of SMS is being achieved - namely, that:
There are several prerequisites for being able to show that safety is being improved as a result of SMS and employee involvement:
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
In every aviation safety management system (SMS), the accountable executive is responsible for ensuring the SMS is properly implemented and working across the entire organization. In order to fulfill this responsibility, accountable executives and their safety teams need tools to identify and address substandard safety performance.
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
Aviation safety managers become apprehensive at certain points in their careers. We see this frequently when:
Topics: Aviation SMS Database
Recently, there has been a significant rise in the interest in reducing data management complexity and increasing synergies by integrating quality management systems (QMS) and safety management systems (SMS) in the aviation industry. This is probably because many aviation service providers have already begun or have well-developed SMS implementations.
Alternatively, the interest may result from the overwhelming number of data management systems that modern aviation service providers use to manage operations.
Topics: Quality-Safety Management
Since November 2006, most commercial aviation service providers have been required to implement formal aviation safety management systems (SMS) to comply with the International Civil Aviation Organization's (ICAO) mandate.
These operators must develop and maintain a formal risk management process for identifying hazards and implementing needed changes in their operational environments to help reduce risk to acceptable levels.
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
You depend on your safety manager to monitor and improve safety in your area of operations, regardless of whether you are an:
Most employees instinctively trust safety managers to act in their best interest – to do the right thing for you. Perhaps this is a naive assumption made by employees.
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
These two on-demand videos offer:
