With regulator mandates for safety management systems in new segments of the aviation industry, it’s more important than ever for companies and individuals to understand how an SMS works, how their team’s new digital tools work, and how they can best use them — and the safety-first ways of thinking they engender — to drive a culture of safety throughout their organisation.
“A Safety Management System,” says the UK Civil Aviation Authority, “is a systematic and proactive approach to managing safety risks. Risk management activities are at the heart of SMS, including the identification of safety issues, risk assessments and risk mitigation. It is supported by a strong assurance function that monitors compliance and performance as well as managing changes.”
“To be effective, the SMS needs the right policies, processes and procedures in place, in addition to the safety leadership to enable it to perform,” notes the CAA. “Training also plays a key role in implementing effective safety management systems. Training maintains personnel competencies, the sharing of safety information across the organisation, and with external organisations where there is a safety interface. “
SMS guidelines evolved as a practice in the early 1990s, with a variety of mandates for commercial carriers beginning to emerge in the mid 2000s. The US Federal Aviation Administration issued its final rule requiring SMS for part 121 operators in 2015, in response to rulemaking proposals dating back to 2009.
In practical terms, Steve Bruneau, Polaris Aero’s vice president of aviation services tells us, “Safety Management Systems are a means of objectively capturing safety related inputs from your operation so that problems can be assessed for root cause and concerns can be assessed for risk and then corrective actions and risk controls can be put in place to avoid hazards and risk. An SMS serves as the safety knowledge management system for your operation and is ever evolving to help steer pertinent company resources in the right direction to maintain operational safety and avoid incidents and accidents that cost money, or cause injuries, damage to assets, the environment, or even company reputation.”
By and large, the aviation industry is enthusiastic about most efforts to improve aviation safety, recognising that improvements and best practice can often be learned. Few, if any, other industries are in a similar position — is there, for example, any equivalent to the 22-season Air Crash Investigations (also known as Mayday and Air Disasters in some markets) within other lines of work, where the general public is so fascinated by the real-world impact of aviation safety?
Nonetheless, there can be a perception that, because safety is so ingrained within the industry, there can be a reluctance to ‘do more’ over and above the existing frameworks that have made commercial aviation one of the safest ways to travel.
Fundamentally, says Steve Bruneau, “the main benefit of SMS is the ability to proactively manage risk so that a flight operation can avoid safety mishaps. Today, SMS systems are becoming more and more common with operators of all sizes as they realise that managing safety is good for their business and safety procedures are embedded within most of their operational business processes.”
Businesses across the aviation sector can expect further mandates, and should prepare themselves to fulfil the requirements. The US FAA is signalling that mandates are on the way for Part 135 (charter) and Part 145 (repair station)operators, with EASA taking a broadly similar tack, including for design and production organisations.
“In the next five, ten or twenty years,” Bruneau predicts, “SMS will become mandated for many other areas of the aviation industry and the key will be for the means of performing SMS to support operators of all sizes. Technologically speaking, data sharing and the ability to benchmark your operation against peers in your sector will be norm and that offers a lot of potential to shake up the industry in objective customer reviews, insurance policy personalisation, and more transparency that will lead to a more accelerated adoption of SMS principles and procedures.”
There are, of course, challenges. Any time that a new framework is introduced there are inherent compliance costs, and with the current labour shortages and spikes in demand and supply of everything from pilots to MRO to aircraft, it will be vital to avoid either the perception that developing and implementing SMS is a ‘tickybox exercise’ — or that it is indeed such an exercise.
Ensuring that safety items and lessons learned are properly documented, that root cause analysis is comprehensive and productive, and that the information gleaned is shared most effectively is a crucial part of the puzzle and one that needs to be done right.
It’s crucial to ensure that the design and implementation within team workflows is smooth and beneficial to staff, says Bruneau. “When operators can see that they can get the benefits of SMS without large impacts to everyone’s primary tasking, it starts to trigger more momentum and the awareness of safety improvements being a good thing for their business, no matter how big or small they may be.”
New digital tools are helping. For a start, the fact that almost every member of the team on the line can swiftly, easily and electronically submit safety reports — from a computer, tablet, or smartphone — and then to have visibility through them at all levels of an organisation — is a major boon.
“Once that safety report is in the system, now the system can route it to the right people for attention and processing, store and track the progress of the issue, and provide insightful management reports to allow an operator to track outcomes, deviations and malfunctions, causal effects, and risk controls so that they can see where they should apply their resources to properly manage risk,” Bruneau says. “Being in the digital world, the speed at which this can all be done and the transparency that is available to the operation allows this type of tool to really become instrumental to the overall process improvement of any operation.”
Author: John Walton
Published: 3rd February 2022
Feature Image: by Stefan Fluck on Unsplash
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