Selective Confidence Levels

By Didrik Strand offroadpilots@gmail.com
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, since complete regulatory requirements are fundamental to a valid operations certificate. When the regulations require a Safety Policy to be in place, or to have an Emergency Plan in place, these requirements have to be met for the issuance, or continuing compliance of an operations certificate. There are no sliding scales for regulatory requirements to be excluded based on bias, or personal opinions. In preparation for an audit, an enterprise has no options but to enter into an audit with a 100% confidence level of regulatory compliance. A regulatory impact level does not consider customer service, business competition or cost of compliance to regulatory critical requirements. This level only considers regulatory compliance. 

On the other hand, there are magnitudes of opportunities in the operational impact level of an SMS system to establish selective confidence levels for operational processes. An operational impact level considers customer satisfaction, as viewed by the customers, when applying selective confidence levels to safety critical processes. These processes are without beginning or end, but follows the travelling public through their path of life experiences. Simplified, this can be said that an airplane crash also affects the general public who did not book on that particular flight, or who were on anther flight, or at the time was without any travel plans. One single airplane crash, or hijacking affects the life, or lifestyle of everyone. 

A regulatory compliant design is affected by operational processes.
Without SMS in aviation, the confidence level of regulatory compliance and operational processes for safe operation of airport or aircraft are unknown. In a non-SMS organization, the confidence level is 100% certain to be completely unknown for performance of processes applied and if these processes are skewing towards safe or unsafe operations.  

Selective confidence level is to apply Safety Management System processes selectively to the impact of cost of safety for each process. Some processes require a 100% confidence level not to compromise aviation safety, while other processes, with lower safety impact, may be acceptable with a 95% confidence level for safe operations.   




Helena1320

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Accepting or Rejecting Risks

By Didrik Strand offroadpilots@gmail.com
Image
Accepting or rejecting risks is a fundamental principle in a successful safety management system (SMS). A person managing the safety management system is expected to maintain a process for identifying hazards to aviation safety and for evaluating and managing the associated risks and ensuring that personnel are trained and competent to perform their duties as they apply to the safety management system. This includes training for both the accountable executive and SMS manager, in addition to other airport and airline operations personnel. A level of risk is an inherent element of aviation safety and there are several types of risks to consider when accepting or rejecting risks. One type of risk may take precedence over another type even if it is not directly associated with operations. Risk control strategies are beyond accepting or rejecting a risk, it is to justify control actions based on defined criteria. There are five categories of risks. The total risk is the sum of identified an
Read more

Lawless

By Didrik Strand offroadpilots@gmail.com
Image
A safety management system (SMS) is a regulatory requirement for airport and airline operators, the SMS regulations are performance-based, processes must conform to regulatory requirements, but still, a healthy SMS is lawless. In a lawless system events are unrestricted, actions are reactive to immediate threats, and data are collected by random chance. A safety management system contains multiple components to conduct research study of patterns. Research study design is a framework, or the set of methods and procedures used to collect and analyse data on variables specified in a particular research problem. A safety management system research study designs comes in many shape and forms, with advantages and limitations. A rule-based SMS is an overcontrolled system to justify an expected definite and unambiguous output. A system where predetermined results exists, is a system without trust, without learning, without accountability, and a system where information sharing impossible. A la
Read more

Human Factors

By Didrik Strand offroadpilots@gmail.com
Image
Human factors and human errors are two separate things but are often used interchangeable in conversations and in the aviation industry. Human errors are attached to a person who could be linked to an occurrence. In addition, the severity of the outcome is a predetermining factor how important it is to assign human error as the root cause after an accident.  Human error root cause analysis has widespread support from the aviation industry. However, with the implementation of the Safety Management System (SMS) regulations, accountability came into play, and it became impossible to justify human error as the root cause.  A healthy SMS looks at the organization and its systems, and the fact that a person overlooked, or missed an item is no longer a root cause, such as a pilot missing a checklist item. Checklists are required and are used for any flight, but there is no evidence a missed checklist item was the root cause of any accidents. At the other end of the spectrum, completing the ge
Read more