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Safety Management Systems: The Future of Air Safety, Part II

Air Safety Week, March 3, 2008

The Air Charter Safety Foundation's 2008 Air Charter Safety Symposium, entitled "Developing a Healthy Safety Culture" took place February 19-20 at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) Training Center in Ashburn, VA, near Washington, DC.

Despite improving safety statistics, the Air Charter Safety Foundation's premier safety summit, focused on making charter operations even safer by adopting the emerging use of safety management systems (SMS), the core principal of which is establishing a safety culture that requires the intense dedication of the entire organization. But in so doing, the efficiency and productivity of the company rises, balancing out the investment needed to develop and implement SMS programs.

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The Safety Symposium emphasized not only the changes necessary for operators but those for regulators as well, with Transport Canada being on the leading edge of a new surveillance trend that departs from record audits to assessing a company's safety management system and whether or not it is meeting expectations. But that new surveillance requires a reassessment, and in some cases, a rewrite of regulations and even legislation to ensure they can accommodate the differences in safety management systems.

Attendees of the 2008 Air Charter Safety Symposium heard from a senior safety official with Transport Canada who described how her government is accommodating SMS.

Just as operators are being asked to incorporate safety management systems, so too are regulators with Transport Canada at the leading edge of not only helping operators incorporate such systems, but in reorganizing itself to a new oversight methodology that accommodates SMS.

Transport Canada's Technical and National Programs Chief Jacqueline Booth-Bourdeau recounted the Canadian experience while Don Arendt of the FAA's Flight Standards Certification and Surveillance Division outlined similar efforts in the U.S.

Transport Canada has a decade of experience in developing and implementing safety management systems which, said Booth-Bourdeau, is intended to help companies understand their flight safety risks and deal with those risks through an integrated management system." She described an SMS as "a documented process for managing risks that integrates operations and technical systems to ensure aviation safety and the safety of the public. The SMS process is the infrastructure and the safety culture is making it all work effectively. Everyone has a safety culture - good bad or indifferent."

A good system, she said, includes several principal components including a safety management plan, document management, training, quality assurance and emergency preparedness. The first outlines company safety policies and assigns the roles and responsibilities for those held accountable for the implementation and enforcement those policies. Such a document describes the SMS process, safety performance targets and how they will be measured and reviewed.

"You can have a system that is compliant but that doesn't mean it is measurably effective," she said.

As for documentation, which includes all printed materials pertaining to the safety of flight, the first step is to identify the applicable regulations, including standards and exemptions, and where required, procedures for demonstrating compliance. There must also be a system for changing documentation as federal or manufacturer bulletins, airworthiness directives and advisory circulars are issued.

"Safety oversight now is a reactive process of hazard reporting," she said. "What we are doing is proactive safety assessments and combining them with the reactive process. SMS is about anticipating, understanding and managing the risk."

The pro-active process includes hazard identification, a hazard register, safety risk profiles, which prioritizes those hazards and helps establish a battle plan not only in dealing with those hazards but with changes in the operating environment such as annual growth, new aircraft, or loss of personnel. In other words, she said, managing them in a way that minimizes risk.

Booth-Bourdeau emphasized that training should include investigation and analysis techniques, human and organizational factors, business processes, reporting techniques, and auditing techniques. It could also include line oriented safety analysis (LOSA) and Flight Operations Quality Assurance techniques and give everyone an awareness of how each system works, not just the regulated areas.

"They must understand how all parts of the company impact risks," she said. "That includes how marketing impacts safety and making a safety case for choosing a new route, for example. Everyone has to be trained to participate in that system. The role of the operator is to understand and mitigate the risk. Regulators should not be doing the quality assurance for the operator.

Transport Canada will no longer conduct compliance audits. Instead, the agency is looking at whether or not an operator understands and manages risks as well as the processes in place to accomplish this."

Government Industry

Safety Management Systems: The Future of Air Safety, Part II

Air Safety Week, March 3, 2008

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