Where Birds Don't Fly

Regulations require that an enterprise, being airport or airline, has a process for setting goals for the improvement of aviation safety and for measuring the attainment of those goals. The regulations requires only one process, or one method for setting multiple goals. The regulations also requires that an enterprise has established one process to measuring the attainments of their goals. When an enterprise goes above and beyond the regulations, they are applying the best-practices principle. Enterprises applying more than one process for goals setting and attainment are applying their best-practices to the SMS operations. However, there is a catch. The regulator has established expectations, or their own opinions, of what the process must include. A process must include that objectives and goals are consistent with the safety policy and their attainment is measurable.  Expectations are the foundation for your success. Official, established expectations is a helpful tool for opera...

If you could improve your Safety Management System by 10 times, would that be a good thing for your organizations? Most will agree this is a good thing. Most will also agree that improving SMS is beyond operational control, since safety is a part of the daily activities…but that’s not true. You are in control of your SMS. Since the beginning of aviation SMS, the question is asked 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? There are a million answers to this question, but one fundamental reason is that airlines and airports did not understand how to apply a businesslike approach to their Safety Management System. Only safety wishes were applied. You can improve your SMS by 10 time when applying a businesslike approach to the Safety Management System.  It might be complex or it might be simple, but there is a formula for everything. It’s a very simple formula with 7 dail...

Over the years, the Regulator has conducted SMS Assessments, Program Validation Inspections (PVI) and Process Inspections. In addition, they have conducted several nonstandard Compliance Inspections, which is an old terminology for any type of inspections. The purpose of inspections is to establish an operator’s level of regulatory compliance. Aviation safety inspectors may apply subjectively portions of their Staff Instruction (SI). The SI is not available to the public by searching databases and it could be a conglomerate task for an enterprise to ensure compliance with expected processes. This does not imply that an enterprise does not conform to regulatory compliance, but that aviation inspectors, who don’t comprehend airline or airport operations, may have unreasonable expectations of what to expect of the processes. Nonstandard inspections or audits skews Quality Control. When nonstandard inspections are conducted it becomes extremely difficult for an enterprise to comprehend wha...