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

How SMS Affects Companies’ Finances

While the safety benefits are often stressed far more than the financial benefits of aviation safety management systems (SMS), this is a mistake. When companies benefit financially from a safety initiative, what this means is that they benefit financially because the safety initiative is actually improving safety.

First Thing to Prepare for Aviation SMS Audits

Audits can be extremely stressful. Especially if things haven't been going well in your aviation safety management system (SMS) in terms of performance or implementation progress.

At this point, there's only one thing that you need to do before anything else:

Benefits of Integrating QMS and SMS

Historically, quality management systems (QMS) and safety management systems (SMS) have been implemented and managed as two entirely separate entities. Today this separation persists in many if not most, companies. This is an unfortunate fact because integrating QMS and SMS provides a great opportunity for organizations to:

Aviation is one of the safest modes of transportation, thanks to rigorous safety protocols and continuous learning from incidents. For aviation safety managers, incident investigations are a cornerstone of maintaining and enhancing safety. These investigations aim to uncover the root causes of incidents to prevent future occurrences, not to assign blame.

As outlined in ICAO Annex 13, the sole objective is prevention, ensuring lessons learned contribute to safer skies.

What Are Responsibility, Confidentiality, and Privacy in Aviation Safety Management

In aviation safety management, responsibility, confidentiality, and privacy are the triad that affects how you handle reported safety information. Whether your organization is large or small, your leadership team needs to discuss these factors and decide how to handle them.

Your organization may decide that it doesn’t need to pay particular attention to this triad,

What Are Risk Management Tools

Risk management tools in aviation SMS is simply a vague term that refers to resources that can help you manage risk. Often, the most beneficial resources tend to be simple, inexpensive, and helpful for both providing guidance and helping you organize your time.

What Is Cybersecurity

The aviation industry relies heavily on computers for every touchpoint of aviation service, from ground to flight operations. Cybersecurity is a term that refers to the safety of such computer systems

What Is Proactive Risk Management

Proactive risk management is often esteemed as the “best” type of risk management. This is because proactive risk management usually matures later in SMS implementation. Also, it involves identifying and stopping issues before they occur.

Despite this, it’s important to understand that proactive risk management is not “better” than reactive or predictive risk management, it is just one necessary strategy for managing risk.

The primary goals of proactive risk management are:

• Identify behaviors that lead to hazard occurrence, and stop it before it happens;
• Identify root causes before they lead to hazard occurrence; and
• Understand the safety “inputs” of your program – i.e., underlying causes that lead to safety performance.

What Is a Management System

The idea of a safety management system (SMS) is something those of us in the aviation risk management industry use as if an SMS were one solid “thing.” But a safety management system is actually made up of multiple ideas, packaged into a single, functioning effort for better aviation safety.

Who Are You Showing Effectiveness of SMS To

Proving the effectiveness of your aviation safety management system comes in several flavors. Who are you proving the effectiveness to? You might be showing your SMS effectiveness at managing safety to:

• Auditors;
• Investors;