Where Birds Don't Fly

It is a regulatory requirement that an airport or airline has a process in place for identifying hazards to aviation safety. It is also expected that an airport or airline has a proactive process or system that provides for the capture of information identified as hazards. At the time when the Safety Management System (SMS) was implemented, both airlines and airports established a reactive process to capture operational hazards as they were relaying on organizational personnel to identify and report hazards. This process in itself is a hazard, but was put in place without a risk assessment or change management analysis. The directive was simply for their personnel to head out to identify and report hazards.  Within the SMS regulations, hazards are defined as a proactive process. A proactive process is to recognize an opportunity and plan a change. It is also to test the change by carrying out a small-scale study or apply your SMS random sampling process. After testing is completed,...

There are several tools available to an enterprise to build an aviation Safety Management System (SMS) program for an airline or airport and every operator wants the best possible tool for their operations. There are several pre-built SMS online software tools available and suppliers who generally offer the same service for an enterprise to conform to their operating system. This turn-key SMS program is an efficient way to establish a regulatory compliant SMS. Both airline and airport operators are then trained by their supplier in operations of the system and what fields to complete to achieve their desired result or outcome. Using this approach an enterprise will have their SMS up and running in no time.  After their SMS system is operational is when the hard work begins. The SMS Manager’s tasks are to identify hazards and carry out risk management analyses of those hazards, investigate, analyze, and identify the cause or probable cause of all hazards, incidents, and accidents, m...