Where Birds Don't Fly

Humans are built with the unique ability to bounce back when things go wrong. Resilience is one of the criteria for learning, improvements, goal achievements and comprehension. Machines or automation does not come with resilience or the ability to comprehend. When a process is without the ability to bounce back it will continue in a randomly selective direction. A process without resilience is like a bag of marbles being dropped on a level floor and they will travel in any random direction. A Safety Management System has resilience within the system itself with the capability for processes to take on the shape and direction as needed for safety improvements. However, when emotions, incomprehension or external forces are applied to SMS, the resilience is removed, and SMS takes on an irreversible direction moving away from safety.   Train tracks are without resilience. Resilience is critical to success in sports. A basketball player becomes a world class player by missing thousands o...

The Accountable Executive is the person within an aviation SMS organization, being airport or airline, who has demonstrated control of the financial and human resources. SMS can be generally interpreted as applying a quality management approach to control safety risks. Just like other management functions, safety management requires planning, organising, communicating and providing direction. All these SMS tasks are time consuming and takes time away from providing customer service. When assessing the risk level there will be a conflict between on-time performance, customer expectations and safety-risk level assigned for the simple reason that the expectation of safety is to add one or more policy restrictions. When assessing the risk, the SMS operator must make a choice between safety or on-time performance. Not only does a risk assessment negatively affect customer service, but the customer, or a lobbyist, may have a direct input on how to interpret the risk and what corrective actio...