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.
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Plan Do Check Act is a simple but effective process to use when implementing risk controls through corrective-preventative actions. The PDCA process is initiated after you discover some deficiency/weakness in your SMS that poses an unacceptable level of safety, such as after an aviation SMS audit, reported safety concern, or trend analysis.
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Aviation safety managers are tasked with a Safety Assurance (SA) element labeled "Continuous Improvement." Not many aviation safety management systems (SMS) training courses go into much detail about "Continuous Improvement" which leaves many safety managers confusedly scratching their heads.
Safety Assurance is the third ICAO component or pillar of an ICAO-compliant SMS framework. Annex 19 - Safety Management and the four components are described in detail in ICAO's Document 9859.
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Leading indicators in aviation safety management systems (SMS) are:
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Passing aviation safety audits is absolutely critical for safety managers, not to mention the accountable executive who is ultimately responsible for aviation safety management systems (SMS) performance.
Their jobs may depend on satisfactorily managing both:
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
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
These two on-demand videos offer:
