Enhancing Aviation Safety: Expert Insights, Tips, and Updates from SMS-Pro

Most Important Questions to Monitor Safety Performance in SMS

Monitoring safety performance in aviation safety management systems (SMS) is undoubtedly one of the most important tasks you will undertake in your SMS. Regulatory requirements turn to monitoring the performance of the SMS from a "nice-to-have program" for reducing risk and avoiding accidents

How to Use Hazard Reporting Forms

It is hard to underestimate the value that high-quality hazard reporting forms provide your aviation SMS.

Hazard reporting quite literally provides the underpinning for your risk management activities. No hazard reports...nothing for you to manage.

Aviation SMS Implemented in Top-Down Approach

Aviation Safety Management Systems (SMS) are critical for ensuring safety and compliance with FAA Part 5 and ICAO Annex 19, yet even top safety managers can fail without the right approach. This article explores two primary reasons for these failures—lack of accountable executive ownership and inadequate data management tools—and offers solutions using SMS Pro, as highlighted in our safety manager guide.

Seeking Out Mistakes in Aviation SMS Implementations

Being honest about mistakes is hard.

It’s even harder to try and seek out mistakes you are making that you do not know you are making.

How to Conduct Root Cause Analysis

Every aviation safety management system (SMS) contains a subsystem to manage risk associated with reported safety issues and audit findings. This subsystem can be called the SMS' risk management system as this system provides the logical workflow necessary to efficiently:

Understanding What Safety Performance in Aviation SMS Is

Safety performance in aviation safety management systems (SMS) can be difficult to fully comprehend because it involves so many moving parts. In general, we understand safety performance as involving the:

• Ability to comply with regulations of oversight agencies;
• Ability to monitor operational safety performance;
• Risk management processes to mitigate risk and monitor risk controls;

Communication Critical to Aviation Safety Managers Role

Aviation safety managers need to give feedback – both praise and criticism – to employees and management regularly. It’s an essential part of their role as a leader in driving the performance of their aviation safety management system (SMS).

Root Human Factors and Symptomatic Human Factors

The Dirty Dozen Human Factors in aviation safety management systems (SMS) are not isolated factors.

They are an interwoven set of human actions that influence each other. And they are not all created equal.

Human Factors Training and Dirty Dozen Posters

How did it all begin? Today, I want to discuss with you just how Human Factors training and the Dirty Dozen posters came to be.

What Is Complacency in Human Factors?

What is complacency? - It’s the self-satisfaction accompanied by a loss of awareness of the dangers.

Two very experienced AMTs (one with 22 years and the other with 33 years of experience) missed 140 cracks during a 100-hourly inspection.