Through the course of daily work in an aviation safety management system, you will discover safety issues – this is called “discovery.” When you make discoveries, such as through hazard reporting or SMS audits, you need to formally process them through your SMS Safety Assurance Process.
Without a doubt, key performance indicators (KPIs) have been on the minds of more aviation safety professionals for the past five years than any other single aviation safety topic. These KPIs cover a wide scope of business operations, such as:
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Policies and procedures are the central backbones of any aviation safety management system (SMS).
During aviation SMS audits, the adequacy of your policies and procedures will be looked at thoroughly. The safety of day-to-day behaviors will be greatly influenced by the quality of procedures being followed.
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Aviation service providers never implement their required aviation safety management system (SMS) quickly. In most cases, it will take three to five years for a medium to a large aviation service provider to completely implement their SMS.
You may scrape by in the early stages by pencil-whipping SMS requirements into shape, but an SMS is more than policies and pretty, well-formatted aviation SMS manuals.
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Aviation safety charts gather and present aviation safety management system (SMS) information to stakeholders. Stakeholders use this visually rich information to make informed, fact-based decisions about SMS and organizational performance.
A popular idiom is "A picture can speak a thousand words." This saying implies that a picture, or chart in our case, can convey complex information more quickly and effectively than attempting to describe the chart's meaning in words.
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Managing safety issues in aviation SMS is largely about performing various investigatory activities to make good safety decisions. Investigatory activities are usually conducted by:
The objective of an aviation quality management system (QMS) is to continually improve the level of customer satisfaction by meeting their needs.
The objective of a safety management system (SMS) is to also continually improve, but instead of focusing on customer satisfaction, an SMS program focuses on stakeholders' safety, both real and perceived.
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
When you perform internal aviation SMS audits, it’s essential you include the auditing of previously managed issues.
Why should you audit previously managed issues? Because external auditors will randomly sample your managed issues and look very closely at the decisions you made and why you made them. If you don’t randomly sample and audit your issues, you can probably expect an audit finding on your next external audit.
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Another aviation safety audit for your safety management system (SMS)...
The safety auditors are coming with established guidelines from:
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Risk analysis is an activity that safety managers will perform on a regular basis for discovered (or potential) issues. You might identify these issues because of a hazard report or during an audit. Regardless of how you identify an issue, you will need to analyze it to understand:
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
These two on-demand videos offer:
