Where Birds Don't Fly

On 15 March, 1960, Santa Claus was on a reconnaissance trip to review his last delivery trip, and verification that he had not forgotten or left someone out this time. Since Santa implemented the SMS (Streamlined Mission Service), he would do a verification trip, or a quality assurance of his deliveries to learn from the past and improve for next deliveries. Since the SMS was implemented, Santa also does triennial travel audits of the operations during the month of March. On this day in March, the reindeers suddenly lost all their flying powers. Santa had been so busy with the quality assurance program and audit preparations that he had forgotten to tell the elves to feed the reindeers that morning, and they ran out of power. This was an embarrassing moment for Santa. He was known all over the world for timely deliveries, safe transportation, except for a few roof-top crashes, and with a unique quality to know what presents people in different areas of the world wants. When the power r...

Accepting or rejecting risks is a fundamental principle in a successful safety management system (SMS). A person managing the safety management system is expected to maintain a process for identifying hazards to aviation safety and for evaluating and managing the associated risks and ensuring that personnel are trained and competent to perform their duties as they apply to the safety management system. This includes training for both the accountable executive and SMS manager, in addition to other airport and airline operations personnel. A level of risk is an inherent element of aviation safety and there are several types of risks to consider when accepting or rejecting risks. One type of risk may take precedence over another type even if it is not directly associated with operations. Risk control strategies are beyond accepting or rejecting a risk, it is to justify control actions based on defined criteria. There are five categories of risks. The total risk is the sum of identified an...

Predictive SMS methods are applied research to entail the development of an expanded and well-organized safety database, as well as the use of predictive, or forecasting methods to identify potential and emerging hazards, trends and behaviour patterns. Using data analysis and predictive methods to identify latent hazards is a tool to prevent future adverse events in operations of any organization. SMS has generated wide support in the aviation community as an effective approach that can deliver real safety and financial benefits. SMS integrates safety concepts into repeatable, proactive processes in a single system. The structure of SMS provides organizations greater insight into their operational environment, including their reactive phase, proactive phase, and predictive phase. A prerequisite for a fully operational predictive safety management system are system analyses.  There are several purposes to operate with a predictive safety management system, and one of these are ...

The person managing the SMS (SMS Manager) for an airline or airport has more opportunities to positively affect safety processes in an organization when there is a physical distance between the operator and SMS Manager. For the integrity of an SMS program, the person managing the SMS is expected to report directly to the Certificate Holder (CH) and remain independent and separate from both airline and airport operations.  It is the CH who appoints a person to manage the safety management system, it is the CH who appoints the Accountable Executive (AE), and it is also the CH who maintain the safety management system. The CH is also the operator, or the operator my be any person in charge of operations, whether as employee, agent, or representative of the CH. The two executive positions as AE and SMS Manager play unique roles by their appointed positions to remain independent of airline or airport operator and preserve the integrity of the SMS. The CH appoints two positions to be res...

  A System Analyses is Safety Risk Management (SRM) and is the highest achievable level of a successful Safety Management System (SMS). Systems analysis is the process of studying a system and its interacting systems. System analysis projects are fundamental to define problems or issues, discover opportunities for incremental improvements, and to publish directives or operations plans. System analyses are what makes the SMS a common-sense approach to incremental process changes.  When applying safety risk management an SMS enterprise conducts system analyses for implementation of new systems, revision of existing systems, development of operational procedures, and for identification of hazards or ineffective risk controls. When conducting a system analysis, an SMS enterprise considered function and purpose of the system, the system’s operating environment, an outline of the system’s processes and procedures, personnel, equipment, and facilities necessary for operation of the s...