In aviation SMS, you analyze risk in order to identify how a particular issue affects safety. Based on your analysis, you can assess the safety issue, thereby ranking the level of risk and understanding what, if any, actions you need to take on the issue.
When you analyze the risk of an issue, you should be looking out for specific parts of the issue, such as:
To analyze risk in a reported issue, you will need to have:
The more information you have at your disposal when analyzing risk, the better.
You can analyze risk with a variety of tools. Some operators will choose to perform risk analysis with just one comprehensive tool, whereas other operators use specific risk analysis tools for different types of analysis. Here are some tools you can use:
These tools will help you identify and segment the narrative
Step one for risk analysis is to understand what exactly was reported. Employees report everything from:
How you analyze risk depends quite a bit on what was reported.
For our analysis, we will use the following example scenario to provide a reference: “Cockpit door not closed properly before deicing because there was no procedure to do so and ground crew and flight crew did not coordinate their tasks. Fumes from deicer spray leaked into aircraft and made several passengers seriously ill.”
The hazard occurrence will be your starting point for understanding the issue.
To find the hazard occurrence, you need to look at the narrative of the issue. In this narrative, you are looking for the point at which a dangerous condition arises. This is:
The reported issue may or may not have an identifiable hazard. In cases where benign issues are reported, you don’t really have a “dangerous condition” to identify.
Other times, the reported issue may be a proactive identification of concerns before hazard occurrence. In this case, you will need to make your best guess at what hazard WOULD HAVE occurred had the issue not been proactively identified.
Finally, sometimes the reported issues will focus on a negative outcome and provide no details about the hazard occurrence that led to those outcomes. In this case, you will have to speak to relevant personnel to get more data about what happened. In our example scenario, the hazard is when the ground crew started deicing while the aircraft door was open.
For more information about what a hazard is and how to identify it, see the resource below.
After identifying the hazard, you need to identify the most likely negative outcome that the identified hazard can lead to.
As discussed in the last section, the reported issue may already have a negative outcome. In this case, you don’t need to perform further analysis on the negative outcome because the issue reporter already provided it for you.
If a negative outcome did not occur, such as in the event that employees identified the dangers before the negative outcome, you will need to identify what the most likely negative outcome of your identified hazard is.
“If [hazard]…Then [bad outcome]…” risk statements are a good way to establish the most likely negative outcome. In our example scenario, we would identify our negative outcome as
In the example scenario, the negative outcome is multiple customer injuries.
An integral part of risk analysis is analyzing the issue for root causes. Root causes are the existing conditions and behaviors (i.e. mechanisms) that conspire together to lead to hazard occurrence. Another way of saying it is that root causes play a “causal” role in hazard occurrence.
It’s useful to have a Hazard/Because root cause statement. It looks like this, using our example scenario:
You should document your root causes, such as via classifications, for later data mining.
Contributory factors are similar to root causes, but whereas root causes directly result in problems (i.e. they are “causal”), contributory factors are simply other factors that may intensify or “speed up” the transition from root causes to hazard occurrence.
You may be able to identify contributory factors in the narrative, or you may have to inquire more information. To use our narrative example, we might do further research into the issue and discover that some contributory factors were:
In both cases, these factors were not “causal”, but they certainly contributed to the hazard occurrence and negative outcome.
You should document your contributory factors, such as via classifications, for later data mining.
Once you understand the entire scope of the issue, you need to analyze the severity of the negative outcome. The steps are as follows:
You will use this analysis to decide on the overall severity of the issue during risk assessment.
You also need to analyze the issue for the future likelihood that the negative outcome will occur in the event of the hazard occurrence. The steps for this are:
Based on this analysis, you should have a good idea of whether this negative outcome is frequent, somewhat common, rare, etc. You will use this analysis during risk assessment to assign a likelihood level to the issue.
In our example narrative, we would identify this as the first occurrence in an organization and as very rare in the industry. Based on this, we might eventually assign a likelihood assessment of the “Isolated issue.”
Last updated in July 2024.