Where Birds Don't Fly

Safety Management System (SMS) Bulletins is published for current issues and areas of concern. Areas of concern may be based on data and facts, or just an opinion of the SMS bulletin publisher. Opinions are forward looking, while data and facts are backwards looking. One is just as important as the other. For SMS bulletins to be effective they should be published regularly. Just as a newsletter in a small or medium SMS Enterprise, a SMS bulletin communique should be expected to arrive in the inbox monthly.  An active safety culture can be considered as the heart that is vital to the continuing success of an SMS, and it gives the dynamic energy needed for a system to provide a continuous cycle of incremental improvement. This can only be developed by leadership, commitment and setting a good example. When an SMS bulletin is published at irregular intervals, or not published at all, is an appearance of a level of commitment to SMS below what is expected of the workers. SMS bulletins ...

The origin of an occurrence travels through multiple stages until it is analysed as a root cause. When it comes to aviation safety, prevention of accidents and the Safety Management System (SMS), conventional wisdom is that there could be multiple root causes causing an occurrence. There might be multiple root causes, but there is only one primary root cause breaking away, leading the way to define the scope of the root cause analysis. The fist step in a root cause analysis is not to learn why an occurrence happened or why a latent hazard became an issue, but it is to assign the scope of the analysis to multiple root cause factors. One reason for assigning predetermined root cause factors is to work within a structured analysis system. SMS is also a businesslike approach to safety. The aviation industry put a safety management system in place as an extra layer of protection for incremental safety improvements. When conducting a root cause analysis outside of a structured system, the an...