Where Birds Don't Fly

SMS Does Not Make Aviation Safer On July 7, 2017 Air Canada 759 lined up the approach for landing on Taxiway Charlie at SFO. This scenario of parameters was set up for the worse accident in the history of aviation. Based on this incident, does the argument hold water that a Safety Management System makes flying safer? Aviation safety is determined by several factors, where one factor to make flying safer is how well an enterprise is applying SMS as an additional layer of safety in support of their safety processes. An enterprise that supports bureaucratic processes or processes that are designed to support the organization are check-box syndrome processes. These processes only have one goal, which is to control, but not manage, the operational Safety Management System.  In the public opinion, the blame-factor may be assigned to the Safety Management System requirement itself. However, the Safety Management System itself is fail-free system and telling a story of safety performance....

What is a suitable medium and who should it be suitable for?  The unknown variable of this question is who is to decide if the SMS is in a suitable medium or not. Since there is a regulatory requirement is for SMS information is made available in a suitable medium the regulation is written with ambiguity to allow for differences due to organizational size and complexity, but it’s also written for the regulator to decide based their own opinion what is a suitable medium. Airports are the smallest in size enterprise required to operate with an SMS, where there could be a couple of employees, where one is the Airport Manager and SMS Manager, and the other is the Accountable Executive. A suitable medium may be different for an airport than a large airline with thousands of employees.  At one time, gold and cow hide may have been a suitable medium. A suitable medium may mean something totally different from person to person, from organization to organization or from time to time. S...