In aviation maintenance, as in all other aspects of the aviation sector, safety is paramount. 4 safety management practices that can be applied to make any maintenance operation safer are:
Topics: Quality-Safety Management
Aviation companies of all shapes and sizes can benefit from a safety management system or SMS, but when faced with implementing one, small organizations can easily find themselves overwhelmed by the requirements.
In its Safety Management Manual (SMM) the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) proposes a phased approach to SMS implementation. While this approach may work well for large organizations, it doesn't seem to have been developed with small aviation companies in mind.
Topics: 1-Safety Policy
Your Safety Risk Management process is how you design your SMS.
First you design and document your SMS, and then update it as your SMS and/or environment changes.
Developing your SRM process, and in turn, designing your SMS happens largely in Phase 3 of aviation SMS Implementation.
Completing your SMS design is a major hurdle, as it is extensive and has many moving parts:
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
Identifying hazards is a big part of implementing a Safety Management System or SMS. Most of us assume that we know what a hazard is. It’s not a complicated word, we’re pretty sure we know what it means. No problem, right?
Problem is, hazard might be one of the most misunderstood words in the English language. Probably because a lot of definitions you’ll find say something like what Google tells us, “a danger or risk.” From this, we could gather that a hazard and a risk are the same.
Topics: 2-Safety Risk Management
KPIs allow managers to focus on activities that are important to their operations. Understandably, many of these activities may also be important to their civil aviation authority.
Safety managers today are expected to come up with a list of their company's KPIs. After creating their list, they need to track them religiously with the objective of identifying trends and focusing risk management efforts on identified problem areas.
Topics: Key Performance Indicators
If you have been a safety manager for years now, do you remember when you first started? So many questions, such as: Where do I start?
It can be frightening to be suddenly assigned as the safety manager when you know very little about what the "safety manager" does every day. And now you have been assigned to implement a safety management system (SMS)? "What did I get myself into?" you may ask yourself.
Employees of all positions are being assigned as the safety manager, often without direct operational experience.
Topics: Aviation SMS Implementation
What’s the first thing you do when you want to answer a question? You Google it, right? Well, when you Google "aviation SMS", this is what the FAA will tell you:
SMS is the formal, top-down, organization-wide approach to managing safety risk and assuring the effectiveness of safety risk controls. It includes systematic procedures, practices, and policies for the management of safety risk.
Topics: Aviation SMS Implementation
My field of study is aerospace management. In one path of this field alone, airport management, many different systems require complex, diverse operations. Some of these systems are:
Topics: Risk Management Training
Reducing resistance to change in aviation safety management systems (SMS) is not often associated with safety training. But when safety managers know the right topics for aviation SMS training and pursue those topics effectively, a natural consequence is:
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Transparency in aviation safety management is concerned with what types information various employee roles have in your company. By “types of information” we are mostly talking about safety concerns that are discovered through hazard reports, audits, etc.
To be clear, your stance on transparency will clearly outline:
Topics: Safety Culture
These two on-demand videos offer:
