SMS Has Lost Its Trust
Post by CatalinaNJB
The Safety Management System was
sold as a system to the aviation industry that would prevent accidents and act
as a profit generator. In addition, with an effective SMS there would be,
without doubt, an increase in the Return on Investment. So, when this didn’t
happen, and all what SMS did was to generate an additional bureaucratic burden,
higher operations expenses and the industry still experienced fatal accidents,
operators and inspectors chose to reject SMS rather than learn what SMS
actually is. SMS had lost its trust as a trustworthy safety system and as a
contributor for a greater ROI. When trust is lost it is almost impossible to
recover. SMS is in an uphill battle to regain its trust with operators and the
regulatory oversight community.
"SMS had lost its trust as a trustworthy safety system and as a contributor for a greater ROI."
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Accountability works and
must be trusted.
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By
the simple task of implementing SMS and by that alone, the elimination of
accidents, aviation managers were expecting substantial SMS bonuses. However,
bonuses were not handed out and the financial cost of implementing SMS became
another burden. On the day when SMS was fully implemented it had cost medium
size operators six figures to implement. Not only did the SMS create an
unexpected overhead, but the system generated more paperwork than what a paper
mill ever could produce. To top it all off, the regulators and oversight
personnel rejected the regulatory requirements and applied their own opinion
for issuing findings. These opinions were camouflaged as expectations demands
by Head Quarters, while in fact these expectations didn’t even make it to the
level of an Advisory Circular. There was no evidence, and there still is no
evidence or facts supporting that HQ or Standards Office demands these
expectations to be applied as the bases for SMS non-compliance findings and to the
severity of these findings.
An Advisory Circular state on the
very first paragraph that it is for guidance and information only. “This Advisory Circular (AC) is provided for
information and guidance purposes. It may describe an example of an acceptable
means of demonstrating compliance with regulations and standards. This AC on
its own does not change, create, amend or permit deviations from regulatory
requirements, nor does it establish minimum standards.”
An AC doesn’t rank high in the regulatory
hierarchy, but still, the oversight inspectors applied opinions, which do not
even make into the rank of the hierarchy, as the bases for their findings. The
regulatory and oversight community had taken it upon themselves to disregard
regulatory requirements; they had taken it upon themselves to disregard how an
SMS conform to regulatory compliance; they had taken it upon themselves to fail
accountability; and they had taken it upon themselves to inform operators that
there is a regulatory requirement for operators to comply with their opinions
or expectations. This can best be described in that every finding given to an
enterprise begins with: “There is an
expectation that…”
The Safety Management System didn’t
fail and cannot fail since the SMS is a selfie of the operations itself. It is
not SMS that fails, it is the operations itself.
This current time in history is a
somber moment for aviation safety, with the flying public and the oversight
inspectors themselves being ill-informed by someone’s agenda to disguise a
failing SMS as facts. This can best be described by the many news articles,
blots, social media and surveys reported over the last few years how SMS has
failed the public. [searched “sms in aviation failure” for 338,000
results]
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An ICAO State with an
SMS is Accountable to Global Safety.
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SMS
is a wonderful and an inspiring system for continuous improvements to aviation
safety. SMS is human factors, just culture and accountability. SMS is a
significant change in how safety is managed, and it is in its first stage of
aviation safety in all four corners of the world as the NextGen of aviation
safety.
With this in mind, an ICAO State with a current operating SMS is now
Accountable to the Global Aviation Safety Community and the NextGen SMS by
assuring that their own SMS is not infiltrated by ill-informed opinions. This
can only be achieved by trusting each airline and airport operator with the
accountability of their own safe operations. It is the end result of operations
that counts, and not the end result of how tall a stack of paperwork the
operator is capable of producing. It is the Accountability of each ICAO Member State
with an operational SMS to stay clear check-box agenda trap.
The beauty of SMS is that it has a
positive impact on the Return on Investment. An effective SMS has a positive
impact and act as a profit generator and not a burden to operations by becoming
its own self-referential system. The
concept of SMS is simply to double the value of a penny every day, or continuous
safety improvements every day. These improvements are not major changes, but
continuous improvements produced by human factors, just culture and
accountability.
CatalinaNJB
Learn more about SMS: dtiatlanta.com/workshops
