Aviation safety is not a new concept. Unless you have been living under a rock for the past dozen years, you will know that the International Civil Aviation Authority (ICAO) mandated formal aviation safety management systems in November 2006.
At a minimum, these aviation safety management systems (SMS) required that the system:
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
Grab a spare pen and paper so you can write down some notes. What we are looking for is a total score. It works like this:
Topics: Safety Culture
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:
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
In recent years, managerial concerns surrounding organizational transparency have become extremely important at all levels of industry and government. So important in fact, that most sensational news stories in recent years - namely Edward Snowden, Wikileaks, the Sony Hack, Bradley Manning - are issues of organizational transparency.
Topics: Safety Culture
Confidentiality in aviation SMS refers to how much personal information should be made available to your organization. By personal information, we are mainly talking about personal information in safety reports, such as people involved or the name of the reporter.
When safety issues are reported, employees may or may not have access to details about the reported issue.
Topics: Safety Culture
Element 2.2 of ICAO’s requirements is for you to develop and maintain a process to:
While just one requirement, ICAO provides quite a bit of guidance on what this process should look like. There are many considerations in this step, and while ICAO doesn’t explicitly say, “Do it this way,” they provide a lot of meaningful guidance on what a best practice would look like.
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
Safety performance monitoring and measurement is an extremely important part of Safety Assurance. It’s how you verify the safety performance of your organization.
By safety performance, we are talking about:
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Safety managers are tasked with "safety management" which can be considered "risk management." As they practice risk management activities, safety managers are expected to actively "react" to reported safety issues or audit findings.
This activity of "putting out fires" is part of the reactive risk management process that your company is probably pretty good at performing. Otherwise, your company would not still be in business.
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
Aviation safety managers are among the most articulate group of all aviation professionals. I don't have all the answers to why this group is so:
Perhaps this is due to the similarity between truck drivers and pilots. Of course, I'm smiling as I write this, but have you ever noticed how both pilots and truck drivers have the gift of gab?
Topics: 1-Safety Policy
In the aviation industry, it’s important to manage change effectively. Change can be organizational, procedural, or technological.
Change occurs any time an established practice is altered.
Change can seem small, like changing suppliers. Or it could be a large change, like adding a new type of airplane to your feet.
When you plan for changes before they happen, you can take measures to proactively manage risk as well. Managing risk is a fundamental part of managing change.
Topics: Quality-Safety Management
These two on-demand videos offer:
