SMS Pro Aviation Safety Software Blog 4 Airlines & Airports

Understanding What Aviation Safety Culture Is

“Safety culture” is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot in aviation safety management systems (SMS) as a vague reference to different aspects of safety.

Understanding the meaning of aviation safety culture is less a practice in philosophy as it is recognition of what it looks like in actual practice for:

• Safety management’s responsibility;
• Employees’ responsibilities;

Certification vs. Qualification

Last year my wife went to the dentist to have a filling put into one of her teeth. She had severe pain for several days, went back to the dentist, and found out that he had put the filling in backward. He replaced it with a new filling but the next day it fell out of her tooth.

We chose a different dentist this time around.

We’ve all experienced this – you go to the doctor, dentist, etc., and it becomes painfully obvious very quickly that the person working on you should have chosen a different career.

Definition of Safety Culture in Aviation Risk Management

Safety culture in aviation safety management systems (SMS) is usually defined as being the safety attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and values of employees in an organization. Unfortunately, such a high-level, conceptual definition of safety culture does not help safety manager address core personnel challenges in your organization's SMS.

In much of the SMS guidance material pushed out by regulatory agencies and standards-setting bodies, such as ICAO's document 9859 Safety Management Manual,

Aviation SMS Require Regular Safety Communications

Routine work may dull your alertness.

Careless or inattentive attitudes may soon replace the caution that existed when your job was new and interesting.

Without some periodic reawakening to the ever-present hazards in the aviation environment, lethargy deepens, and chances of accidents occurring increase without us even being aware of the risk.

You may not always recognize the importance of recurring safety training. Yet, this training benefits us all in many ways.

Risk Attitude Is the Informal 13^th Human Factor

When analyzing the types of actions and behavior to address during implementing an aviation safety management system (SMS), you have to consider the risk management attitudes of:

• individuals,
• groups (e.g., departments),
• managers, and
• the organization as a whole.

Safety Promotion Places Safety into Our Conscious Zone

An aviation safety management system (SMS) can encompass many different elements but has one overarching goal: improve aviation safety.

The best way to achieve that goal depends on what kind of SMS you participate in. Not all SMS implementations are equal. Some operators merely want to check the box. Others may have a distrustful attitude toward management. Consequently, the type of SMS implementation, as well as the "potential" effectiveness of the SMS will be dependent on:

Building on Basic Human Factors Training

Lack of preparedness is a serious concern for aviation safety.

Uninformed actions can quickly result in devastating safety and financial consequences.

Considering human action accounts for approximately 90% of incidents, preparedness in aviation safety is a matter of preparing humans to identify and understand their own actions.

Why Managers Struggle with Safety Promotion

Safety Promotion is definitely the least appreciated of the 4 Pillars of SMS.

Almost without fail, promoting safety takes the “back seat” in most aviation safety programs because civil aviation authorities and auditors are significantly more interested in seeing that you comply with:

• Safety Policy,
• Safety Risk Management, and
• Safety Assurance.

Transparency Is a Hot Topic

Many of the major news headlines in the last few years have circled issues of transparency. From major corporations to our government, practices of secrecy always come back to bite management in their tender spots.

Aviation organizations that practice transparency tend to send a message of "non-corruption". These forward-thinking operators realize how corporate culture kills aviation safety culture.

Safety Culture Bridges Gap between Promotion and Outcomes

A recent post about four pillars of safety in aviation discussed in part the end goal of aviation safety management systems (SMS). This aviation safety blog post drew a couple of interesting comments regarding the relationship between

• safety values,
• outcomes, and
• interventions.