Where Birds Don't Fly

A Safety Management System (SMS) must be effective to conform to the regulatory performance requirements to have in place a process for reviewing the safety management system to determine its effectiveness. A general definition of effective is a process that is successful in producing a desired or intended result or fulfilling a specified function. SMS is a simple concept to operate within a just culture where there is trust, learning, accountability, and information sharing, while determining effectiveness of the system includes several tasks and processes to capture data relevant to effectiveness. SMS in itself cannot fail since it paints a true image of the enterprise. What can fail is trust, learning, accountability, and information sharing to operate within a just culture. As with any effective system, unless there are lines of defence in place, the system is not an effective system. There are seven lines of defence in an effective safety management system. It is difficult to dete...

Within the world of a Safety Management System (SMS) the task is to identify desired outcomes in operations for both airlines and airport operators. The SMS regulations are performance based, and in a performance-based environment it is crucial to success that goal strategies are researched, designed, developed, and carried out. SMS are building blocks of data, information, knowledge, comprehension, triggers, tasks, oversight, and monitoring. What makes SMS different than tangible project, such as an apartment complex, is that the building blocks within a safety management system are abstract without tangible or physical dimensions. Without physical or measurable limits or perimeters, it becomes a difficult task to assess performance value of the SMS itself.  Elements of a safety management system are performance goals and a means of measuring attainment of those goals and processes to develop and maintain performance parameters that are linked to goals and objectives. Parameters a...

 A Safety Management System (SMS) is a businesslike approach to safety as a dedicated, planned, and systematic approach. In a business, a financial audit is an objective examination and evaluation of the financial statements of an organization to make sure that the financial records are a fair and accurate representation of the transactions they claim to represent. An audit of a Safety Management System is no difference than a business audit.  An SMS includes a general journal, or a data collection tool, where each transaction, or events are entered in order of time and date. The daily quality control tasks performed are credits, and the daily quality control tasks required to be performed are debit entries. The general ledger in an SMS summarized all the journal entries of an account to get the ending balances, where each daily quality control task is its own account and number of tasks performed are compared to the number of tasks required to be performed for that account. A...