Aviation Safety Management Systems (SMS) form the foundation of safe operations, and passing SMS audits is critical for demonstrating compliance with global safety standards while reinforcing an organization’s commitment to safety.
For aviation safety managers, audits are not merely regulatory requirements but opportunities to refine safety practices and build trust with regulators, staff, and passengers.
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.
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:
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.
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.
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
There are many aviation audit checklists available online.
While these checklists offer many specific tasks you need to perform, few checklists offer a broad overview of things that airports, airlines, and other aviation service providers should do to augment audit performance.
The purpose of aviation safety management systems (SMS) is to continuously improve safety performance while also improving the business' operational processes.
Both new and experienced aviation safety professionals sometimes have to ask themselves, what is a gap analysis, and why am I using it?
The first thing anyone needs to understand about a gap analysis is that it is a process used by both new aviation safety management systems (SMS) and maturing SMS. This process is used by aviation service providers to determine:
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
Risk Assessments in aviation safety management systems (SMS) are how you qualify, quantify, and rank risk exposure for:
Topics: 3-Safety Assurance
These two on-demand videos offer:
