Where Birds Don't Fly

Risk assessments are tools to prioritize risks and assign risk values to specific events. Higher risks values have greater safety impact to operations and are affecting operational processes more immediate than lower risk factors. A high number is an immediate shutdown, while a low number that no action is required. A risk is an active condition, but if left alone without mitigation or removal, will cause harm to person or property. Aircraft parts are manufactured and tested to perform within parameters. The risk value number is a factor derived from a risk matrix with assigned categories of probability, severity and exposure. This formula is calculated by probability x severity x exposure = risk factor. Risk factors are assigned numbers for acceptance, mitigation, or not acceptable and colored green, yellow and red respectively.  A risk is not a latent hazard, but an active condition at the time and location of intercepting an airport, or aircraft in flight or taxiing. At one end of t

An applicant for, or an operator of an airport or airline certificate is required to have in place a non-punitive for reporting of hazards, incidents, or accidents and is one of the elements of a Safety Management System (SMS). A non-punitive policy is a policy for an airport or airline to allow for free flow of reports in a Just Culture and collection of data within the organization. In a Just Culture environment, a contributor may not fear repercussion from supervisors, managers or other personnel for reporting. A non-punitive policy is not a get-out-of-jail free card, but a policy of organizational accountability. A non-punitive policy must be understood.  A non-punitive policy is a policy for the internal reporting of hazards, incidents and accidents, including the conditions under which immunity from disciplinary action will be granted. The fundamental of a non-punitive policy is that it is unconditional with “no strings attached” and with pre-established conditions for when immun

Canadian Aviation Regulations (CARs) requires the Safety Management System (SMS) for airports and airlines to have a safety policy in place for regulatory compliance to operate under CARs 302 or 705. This safety policy sets targets for objectives and goals to conform to regulatory requirements. CARs are performance based regulations, where results of operational processes are the determining factors for compliance. There are two parts for Safety Management System CARs compliance. One is design of regulatory compliance, or layout of the plans, while the other is the operational processes for regulatory compliance, or layout for expected outputs.  Regulatory compliance is documented in a manual with descriptions of requirements and operational process regulatory compliance are descriptions of how an airport, or airline plan to execute operations and collect data. Operational safety polices comes in any forms and shapes. Transport Canada developed a set of exp

A Safety Management System (SMS) may be managed from a remote location, by a Strategy Process Solutions (SPS). There are two components to a Remote Management System. One is the SMS, which is an onsite process verification how the job is done, while SPS is the strategy of planning and implementing design processes that conform to regulatory compliance and organizational objectives and goals. Runway management is  dependent  on type of operations. It is of vital importance to manage processes, both for regulatory compliance and safe operation, as a tool to evaluate how effective job-performance descriptions are.  During prior years without SMS the confidence level of how well processes were functioning was in all cases zero. There was no method, or tools available to assess how well the systems worked. There were no data collected to measure the confidence level of any processes, or give guidance of potential malfunctioning processes. It was assumed that it worked well as long as there