Where Birds Don't Fly

With the implementation of a Safety Management System for airports and airlines came the SMS expectations. These expectations are opinion-based of what actions are required by the operators to conform to regulatory compliance. These expectations are not expectations for airports or airlines to manage operational safety, since they do not address safety. One of these expectations is that there is a safety policy in place that is followed and understood. It’s a simple task to determine if the policy exists, but a bit more difficult to determine if the policy is followed. It’s impossible to determine as a fact that the safety policy is understood. Based upon what this safety policy expectation requires, there are no operators currently conforming to regulatory compliance. Before they even got started with the rest of their SMS, they had all failed the safety policy regulatory requirement.  Wishes are the expectations of random flow of events. Within a Safety Management System intent d...

In the 1930’s a triangle, or a pyramid, which shows the relationships between unreported occurrences, reported incidents and accidents was introduced as the Heinrich law. The law had at that time developed facts of interrelationships between the reporting structure in an organization and incidents and accidents. Minor accidents were ignored, or not reported, since it was common sense to move on with the job and get the job done. In short, the law states that in a workplace, for every accident that causes a major injury, there are 29 accidents that cause minor injuries and 300 accidents that cause no injuries. Heinrich Triangle When SMS was implemented in the aviation industry the Heinrich concept was embedded into this new and unknown aviation Safety Management System as fact and became the foundation for reducing or even eliminating accidents. Just recently there was an accident at the “worlds most dangerous airport”, Lukla, Nepal. When reviewing reports of this accident and having vi...

Self Evaluation of your SMS is a hot topic these days. The question is how an operator really is capable, without bias, of evaluating their own Safety Management System, or operational processes. The answer is, they are not. Yes, they might be able to comply with the regulatory requirement, but no matter what emotional rationale is applied, it doesn’t fit the principles of SMS. The more logic that is used as arguments that an operator, being airport or airline, is capable to fairly assess their SMS, the more emotions they are putting into their arguments. An SMS that implies emotions becomes its worst enemy. Unless an operator is capable of comprehending the answer to the following question, they are operating with a check-box SMS only, to satisfy the Regulator. This is the same question as posted before: “Why does the Global Aviation Industry, being Airlines or Airports, need a Safety Management System (SMS) today, when they were safe yesterday without an SMS?” SMS is the compass to s...