The aviation law enforcement community, and members of our aviation industry in general, continue to talk about Safety Management Systems and their implementation. A number of aviation organizations now have Safety Management System SMS in place, but they vary considerably in terms of employee acceptance, effectiveness, and ease of use. This is due in part to the fact that guidance is still forthcoming, and also because each organization’s SMS is typically developed from within, based on existing safety climate/culture and accident prevention programs that have evolved over time. Sadly, many organizations that have “implemented” SMS find themselves with little more than just another manual sitting on the shelf. Most people are in agreement that SMS is a “data-driven approach to safety”. In essence, this means we collect and analyze data, identify hazards and latent conditions, assess risk, and implement risk controls in order to prevent accidents. Some organizations are collecting dat...
Building error tolerance, error mitigation, and error-capturing strategies into our systems should be one of the most important outputs of safety management, especially when guided by a robust FAA safety management system and supported by formal safety risk assessment processes. These strategies are a hallmark of good system design. And when system design flaws are discovered, risk controls are implemented. Monitoring of the affected process then helps us see if our strategies are effective. If not, our previously-implemented controls must be corrected to keep a hazard in check. Way back in the 80’s I was serving as DO for Salair Air Cargo, operating a fleet of 10 old DC-3s and 30 young pilots. We landed 4 new contracts for Emery Worldwide, and suddenly saw a rash of events in which our DC-3 crews were failing to remove the gear pins before flight. Why did this trend appear after thousands of hours of operation? What changed in our operating environment? Back then we didn’t invest...