Aviation safety managers must be prepared for a never-ending chain of audits. This is a fact of life, whether you are working at:
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
An internal aviation safety management system (SMS) audit is a process you used to verify that certain actions are taking place in your SMS.
Audits are a safety assurance activity that is most commonly used to broadly assess whether or not aviation service providers can demonstrate continuous improvement of the SMS.
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
An internal aviation SMS audit is how you evaluate any part of your SMS.
On the one hand, you use such audits to ensure that certain actions are taking place in your SMS, such as SRM operations or continuous improvement.
Safety programs with good audit processes have multiple processes. Each audit process will audit a different aspect of your aviation safety program, such as:
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Over the past dozen years, an aviation SMS audit has become a necessary and commonly difficult task for:
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
The other day, I had a rather interesting discussion with a couple of seasoned aviation safety managers on the topic of aviation safety audits vs inspections.
It took a while to come to a consensus about the primary differences, as well as the ideological implications of each. The discussion got me thinking, and I did some further research.
More than simply understanding the practical difference between the two, it's important to understand the ideological differences between safety audits and safety inspections as well.
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Control measures are the heart of your aviation safety management system’s (SMS) risk mitigation efforts. You may call your "control measures" either:
In this article, we'll use the term "control measures," but I am sure many of you call them "risk controls." Either term is permissible; however, I'm detecting a global preference in the aviation industry for the term "risk control."
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
When you identify a hazard within your organization, the first step is to analyze the risk. If the risk is high, then you need a control measure to reduce risk to acceptable levels.
Any change made to the existing system to reduce risk is a control measure.
Control measures can be simple or complex. Using a less hazardous chemical might be a simple control. Designing and installing a new ventilation system would be more complicated.
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Accuracy is extremely important.
Much of the bureaucracy of safety management systems depend on correct and specific understanding of safety concepts. Misunderstanding definitions in SMS is synonymous with misunderstanding what a safety element is and can compromise how that safety element is:
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Aviation SMS audits are necessary to ensure aviation service providers comply with established guidelines. These established guidelines may come from:
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
The line between reactive and proactive safety workplaces is unfortunately not as concrete as anyone would like. If it were so obvious, many organizations would be far less reactive. The fact is that most cultures are less proactive than they would like to be.
Granted, there are some obvious indicators that an organization is only responding to accidents rather than actively trying to prevent them. For example, we generally understand reactive safety workplaces as only “putting out fires” as they come up. But accepting that reactive workplaces are only this is a rather superficial assessment.
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
These two on-demand videos offer:
