As defined by the US FAA, a Safety Management System — or SMS — is the “formal, top-down, organisation-wide approach to managing safety risk and assuring the effectiveness of safety risk controls.” An SMS will include, according to the FAA, “systematic procedures, practices, and policies for the management of safety risk.”
We sat down with Mark Millam, vice president for technical programs at the Flight Safety Foundation, to delve into some of the newest approaches and technologies to these systems, as well as how airlines — and other organisations — are evolving in how they gather data, process it and learn from it.
“I think perhaps the most interesting thing about SMS work is trying to design the program to work properly and scale it to fit the size and dynamism of the organisation,” Millam tells us. “The process of identifying hazards, assessing the risk, acting on mitigations and monitoring for success is played out over and over again within many organisations and at different levels. Some of this can be very dynamic as issues arise on a given flight, while it can also play out as issues are studied after many flights have already completed. Still broader issues can surface by season, as the organisation changes, as new technology is introduced and as company culture evolves.”
Equally, risk analysis — and the methodology to detect, assess and mitigate safety risks — has both commonalities and unique aspects for every organisation.
“Knowing the potential risks that could affect flying operations comes from extensive efforts to understand the past and to forecast how changes, whether gradual or abrupt, could affect and test the controls for any number of risk factors,” Millam says. “As an organisation gets larger how do you scale the internal audit and monitoring to assure process integrity at high confidence levels? As the culture shifts from generation to generation and learning styles are different from person to person how do you know the best methods for communicating the results?”
New generations of digital solutions can help in bridging this gap, but these will be particularly beneficial for some risks, while remaining less effective for others. And the research is ongoing.
“Many organisations are exploring different methods of capturing and sharing the knowledge gained from SMS programs. Some are finding the quicker the better,” Millam explains. “For example, when pilots can see their own performance immediately after the flight and know any flight discrepancies like unstable approaches, altitude deviations, descent rate anomalies, etc., they are often able to learn more rapidly. Less depends on getting larger volumes of data and then sharing an aggregate picture only after an adverse trend takes place. This more real time feedback is analogous to flight crew debriefs immediately following a flight. Understanding what went well and what could be improved helps to sharpen flying skills and anticipation of issues that might be corrected before they become an issue.”
Aviation has always been at the forefront of assessing safety risks and the benefits of new technologies, researching those technologies in the context of their wider effects on aviation safety, and adopting them if the benefits and risk assessments stack up.
“Over the years we have seen new technology implemented on commercial aircraft that has improved the safety performance over past generations of aircraft design,” Millam says. “No one would question the benefits that have come about from collision avoidance systems and ground proximity warning systems. These kinds of systems provide early detection of potential traffic and on-coming terrain. Instant feedback for flight crews enables and protects pilots from making the mistakes that have caused countless aircraft accidents over decades.”
New technology and procedures to make landings safer, including by improving runway awareness, have seen substantial interest since the mid-2010s, not least owing to high-profile incidents, from which aviation is already learning. This future might include automated warnings when approach conditions are not ideal, giving the flight deck more information.
SMS optimisation and future automation look promising
Optimising a safety management system will inherently be a bespoke situation for every organisation.
In the airline context, says Millam, “in many SMSs we often find the most complete review of hazards and risks come from studies of flight data monitoring on the aircraft while understanding the exceedances from the context of what is happening in the moment.”
Adding multiple sources of data and other information — and assessing it in a holistic, big picture way — is also vital.
“When employee safety reporting is combined with the full flight path analysis and cockpit voice recording,” Millam notes, “a more complete understanding can be visualised and many of the contributing factors can be identified. This more full and complete examination has been realised more often in the past five years and makes it much more possible to get to effective mitigation actions.”
The sources of data giving insights into safety management are numerous, and include, Millam says:
- Employee safety reporting systems
- Mandatory event reporting systems
- Flight Data Monitoring programs
- Audits at an organisation level or the State level (ICAO USOAP)
- Operational statistics (departure, delays, cancellation data, loading, damage reporting)
- Past accident and incident investigation reports (organisation and industry)
- Pilot aircraft logbook writeups, mechanical service difficulty reporting, aircraft out of service (AOG) logs, MEL/CDL logs
- Employee surveys
- Employee injury reporting
In larger airlines or other organisations, this data is often collected by specialist staff in different operational departments using different systems, so avoiding any silo effect is vital. In smaller outfits, meanwhile, fewer employees may be responsible, and may have a greater scope of responsibilities. In these cases, a stronger focus may need to be put on ensuring that skills and detailed understanding are at the appropriate level.
“Of course, more and more of this has become automated as these systems have evolved over decades,” Millam says, noting that with modern approaches to SMSs, “the analysis is often conducted by analysts that work to integrate the information is automated or interactive displays so that any manager can see the detail as it pertains to their part of the operation.”
This integration will, eventually, become more automated, with systems communicating with each other, adding algorithmic analysis or suggestions, and providing benefits around reduction of weather impacts, system disruptions, or other challenging conditions.
“At the moment,” Millam says, “Flight Safety Foundation is contributing to an effort to map out the implementation of an In Time Aviation Management System by recognising a multitude of data sources and services so that this real time reaction to hazards and risks can be met with a variety of airspace vehicles including unmanned operations.”
Author: John Walton
Published: 28th June 2022
Photo by L.Filipe C.Sousa on Unsplash
;
