Where Birds Don't Fly

An Aviation Safety Management System (SMS) provides a structured way to identify hazards, assess risks, introduce controls, and determine whether those controls work. Its purpose is to support sound decisions before harm occurs and improve operations through continuous learning. The Vikings called their SMS “Sail My Seas”. Viking voyages offer a useful historical analogy: crews crossed unfamiliar waters where weather, navigation, vessel condition, supplies, and human judgment could determine survival. Applying SMS principles to those journeys illustrates how leadership and organized learning can strengthen safety. This is a hypothetical comparison, rather than a claim that Vikings operated a formal SMS resembling modern aviation systems. The Vikings’ extensive voyages demonstrate the importance of managing uncertainty. Norse expansion across the North Atlantic connected distant communities and reached places including Iceland, Greenland, and North America. Such journeys required practi...

Aviation safety management requires more than assigning a colour or numerical score to a reported hazard. A comprehensive Safety Management System (SMS) must provide a consistent process that begins when a report is received, protects the operation through immediate securing actions, evaluates the hazard using defined criteria, determines the required organizational response, and follows the issue through investigation, corrective action, monitoring, and follow-up. The attached 10×10 risk matrix and supporting definitions provide this broader capability and therefore offer significant advantages over a conventional 5×5 matrix. The principal advantage of the 10×10 matrix is analytical resolution. A 5×5 matrix provides twenty-five likelihood-and-severity combinations, while a 10×10 matrix provides one hundred combinations. Aviation hazards frequently differ only incrementally in frequency, consequence, or operational exposure. When only five categories are available, materially different...

A Safety Management System (SMS) is designed to identify hazards, assess risks, implement effective controls, monitor performance, and continuously improve safety throughout an organization. Achieving these objectives requires more than collecting reports and conducting audits. It requires understanding how the entire system behaves over time. Statistical Process Control (SPC) provides this capability by transforming operational and safety data into meaningful information that supports evidence-based decision-making. Rather than relying on assumptions, isolated events, or subjective opinions, SPC enables organizations to distinguish between normal process variation and genuine signs of deteriorating safety performance. As a result, management can focus resources where they will have the greatest impact while maintaining confidence that safety decisions are supported by objective evidence. Every operational process contains common cause variations. In aviation and other safety-critical ...

During the 109 complete months from August 2016 through August 2025, the combined dataset records 1,269 commercial aviation accidents in Canada and the United States. Of these, 625 occurred in Canada and 644 occurred in the United States. This represents a remarkably even geographical distribution: approximately 49.3 percent occurred in Canada and 50.7 percent in the United States. The combined average was approximately 11.6 commercial accidents per month. These figures should not be interpreted as accident rates because the workbook does not contain exposure data such as departures, flight hours, passenger miles, aircraft movements, or commercial fleet utilization. They measure occurrence frequency only. Commercial aviation represented approximately 9.8 percent of the 12,965 total aviation accidents recorded across the combined dataset during these 109 months. General aviation therefore accounts for the substantially larger portion of accident frequency. However, commercial aviation r...

Some time ago, a comprehensive series of Corrective Action Plans (CAPs) was developed for an airport in response to findings identified by Transport Canada during a regulatory oversight activity. Each corrective action plan was prepared using the principles of the aviation Safety Management System (SMS), conforming to Advisory Circulars, with the objective of addressing the root causes of every finding, strengthening regulatory compliance, and establishing sustainable processes that support continuous safety improvement. Rather than treating the findings as isolated deficiencies, each CAP examined the underlying human factors, organizational factors, supervision factors and environmental factors that contributed to the observation. Every finding was individually analyzed, documented, and linked to specific corrective actions, assigned responsibilities, implementation timelines, verification methods, and long-term monitoring activities. This systematic approach ensured that corrective a...

The Canadian Safety Management System (SMS) is designed to continuously improve aviation safety by identifying hazards, managing risk, monitoring performance, and learning from operational experience. Among the six SMS components, Training and Quality Assurance perform complementary but distinctly different functions. Although they are often discussed together, they serve different purposes within an effective safety management system. Training provides individuals with the knowledge, skills, and procedures required to perform their duties safely, while Quality Assurance determines whether those duties are being performed effectively and whether improvements are required. In practical terms, training prepares people to do the job, while Quality Assurance enables both individuals and organizations to learn how to do the job better. Training is a planned and structured activity. It introduces personnel to regulations, company policies, operating procedures, hazard reporting systems, emer...

 INSTANT GRATIFICATION AND QUALITY CONTROL A strong leader is often viewed as a leader who speaks loudly, makes decisions on the fly, and say they solved the problem by disciplining employees when things go wrong. Investors trust someone who seem powerful. A leader who admits that their safety system did not work and say it will take 6-9 months to repair the issue, lose credibility with investors and the flying public. Who would you book a flight with? An airline stating they disciplined the employee who was the problem, and there are no other problems, or an airline admitting to a system failure leading up to the event, but they are flying as normal during this time of repair, and they should be fully operational in 6-9 months. Educated guess that the airline who fires pilot is more successful. At least it was for a private Air ambulance service supplier. QC QA REVIEW Quality Control (QC) Circles – Doing The Right Things Quality Control circles are small groups of employees who re...

Within the framework of the Canadian Aviation Regulations (CAR) Safety Management System (SMS), Quality Control (QC) and Quality Assurance (QA) perform complementary but distinctly different functions. Both are essential to maintaining aviation safety, yet they operate with different objectives, methods, leadership approaches, and behavioral expectations. QUALITY CONTROL Quality Control is primarily concerned with verifying that work has been completed correctly according to established standards, regulations, procedures, and operational requirements. It focuses on identifying defects, correcting non-conformances, and restoring compliance before unsafe conditions result in incidents or accidents. QUALITY ASSURANCE Quality Assurance, by contrast, evaluates whether the entire management system consistently produces safe outcomes, identifies trends, verifies the effectiveness of policies and risk controls, and continually improves organizational performance. Under the CAR SMS, these two e...