Where Birds Don't Fly

A businesslike approach to Safety Management System (SMS) is to establish a budget for incidents and accidents with established budget goals. SMS is believed to be a cost savings from accident prevention and promoted as having enormous cost savings benefits. Nothing could be farther from the facts. SMS is nothing else but another operational cost, just as any other operational costs.  The cost effectiveness of SMS is not how many fewer accidents there are, but how cost of SMS is managed in a businesslike system. If an SMS system could predict future accidents, or lack of future accidents, operations of airport and airlines affected would have to cease operations during those hours or minutes when SMS had predicted accidents or incidents.  For an enterprise to identify cost savings there must be one or more defined activities attached to that identification. A virtual, or future prediction of non-accidents are fantasy wishes. SMS is only as effective as collected data explains reliabili

An effective Safety Management System (SMS) is for personnel to know and understand how safe airlines and airport operations are. Knowledge and understanding is a product of in depth analysis of data, establishing and applying confidence levels to selective processes and to place each component of a system in relevance to desired outcome. Not all processes are equally safety critical for safe operations of airport or aircraft. However, all processes are regulatory critical to regulatory requirements for compliance. Any regulatory requirements are to conform, without deviations, to a 100% confidence level of regulatory requirements. Regulatory requirements do not differentiate on a scale of safe or unsafe, but differentiate only on a scale of compliance or non-compliance. The two impact levels of SMS are regulatory and operational.  Regulatory compliance of a system is an authorization for operational processes. In a regulatory system selective confidence levels are not acceptable, sinc