Where Birds Don't Fly

Building a Winning SMS [Safety Management System] Team begins and ends with you. You are the person who holds the keys to open doors of data, information, knowledge, and comprehension.  Building a Winning SMS Team is to clear a path of least resistance within a hazard environment. While building the team is to clear a path of least resistance, designing the path is to incorporate a conglomerate of tasks and to navigate insurmountable hazards. A Winning SMS Team operates at a 95% confidence level that your human factors system is in control.  The difference between a 95% confidence level and a 100% confidence level that operational processes are in-control, is that there is no room for safety improvements at the 100% safe operational level.     Building the Winning SMS Team started with a blank sheet of paper and a pencil on a cold October 12th day. Designing a Safety Management System is beyond any task of designing other types of systems. SMS is a team of human...

COVID19 affected air travel and airport operations to a degree never seen before. Major airports went down to 10% of normal movements and the airlines parked thousands of airplanes at these same airports. COVID19 was a disaster for the aviation industry with little or no hope to recover back to 2019 levels for several years.  An effective Safety Management System (SMS) could not have prevented this disastrous outcome and would not have made one difference for safety in operations. However, what any airport or airline would have in place with an effective SMS, is a recovery tool unlike any other tool.  When a hazard is discovered for the very first time, or a special cause incident occurs for the very first time, three corrective action plan (CAP) options are available. Option one is the extreme to cease operations, or the other extreme to do nothing. The CAP solution when arriving at the fork-in-the-road and holding on to a previously unidentified hazard, is not to develop a C...

Building your winning Safety Management Team (SMS) is more important today than it ever was before. SMS is no longer just another safety program but has become the single most important system for departmental oversight and safety in operations. Organizational processes and operational culture do not change within departments but are laterally equal throughout any department. An organizational culture are the faces of their Board Members, Owners, and CEO which does not change between departments. Putting on a different hat might work when taking on different positions in an enterprise, but the magic hat does not move a business culture between positions. There is only one organizational hat when it comes to the organizational structure, and that hat given to everyone by the CEO.  An effective Safety Management System is a businesslike approach to safety. A businesslike approach to any enterprises is applied throughout the business and not just to selective areas of operations, one ...