SMS Bulletins

 SMS Bulletins

By OffRoadPilots

Safety Management System (SMS) Bulletins is published for current issues and areas of concern. Areas of concern may be based on data and facts, or just an opinion of the SMS bulletin publisher. Opinions are forward looking, while data and facts are backwards looking. One is just as important as the other. For SMS bulletins to be effective they should be published regularly. Just as a newsletter in a small or medium SMS Enterprise, a SMS bulletin communique should be expected to arrive in the inbox monthly

An active safety culture can be considered as the heart that is vital to the continuing success of an SMS, and it gives the dynamic energy needed for a system to provide a continuous cycle of incremental improvement. This can only be developed by leadership, commitment and setting a good example. When an SMS bulletin is published at irregular intervals, or not published at all, is an appearance of a level of commitment to SMS below what is expected of the workers. SMS bulletins offer options to management to justify a safety management system that is versatile, flexible, and fluid. A rigid SMS system is a hazard to aviation safety, while a versatile, flexible, and fluid SMS system leaves room for incremental improvements. A grassroot SMS with left-out checkboxes, but with 100% buy-in is infinitely better than a perfect high-level system with all checkboxes completed but are without commitments. Publishing a bulletin about cognitive lockup, is one example of an ongoing human factors campaign.

SMS bulletins are issued by the person managing the safety management system as a data point to conform to regulatory compliance by monitoring the concerns of the civil aviation industry in respect of safety and their perceived effect on the certificate holder. An SMS is generally defined as a formalized framework for integrating safety into an organization's daily operations, including the necessary organizational structures, accountabilities, policies, and procedures. SMS is a tool that becomes part of an organization's culture, and of the way people go about their work. While individual personnel routinely make decisions about risk, SMS focuses on organizational risk management, human factors, supervision factors and environmental factors, and includes and supports the decision makers. An SMS is scalable and can be designed to meet the needs of a given operation in a way that respects the scop and nature of their work. An SMS bulletins fits in by addressing areas of interest within the scope and nature an SMS enterprise. The scope and nature of an organization are best known by the operators themselves and SMS bulletins are excluded from a one-fit-all. 

An SMS bulletin is a communique with a link to the SMS Safety Policy to provide for a bulletin with accountability. Accountability is a place where there is trust, jut culture, learning and information sharing. An SMS bulletin builds trust between human interactions, human and hardware interactions, human and software interactions and human and the operating environment. An SMS bulletin builds faith in the internal SHELL model. Bulletins are often viewed as a tool to communicate immediate threats to aviation safety, approaching hazards (e.g hurricanes or winter storms), or to communicate common errors by personnel. While these are valid events to publish bulletins, within a safety management system a bulletin is a tool to instill operational awareness of daily regular tasks.     

 

SMS bulletins are tools to instill awareness and competency in daily operations. When the reasoning for a task is that “we have always done it this way and had no accidents”, it is often forgotten that several years ago multiple fatal accidents happened. Human behavior is to suppress what is unpleasant. SMS bulletins is a path to accountability in a just culture. A common human behavior is to believe that we are quite skilled at multi tasking. Nothing could be farther from the fact. The concept of effective multi tasking is simply a common misbelief, with no basis in science. Task sequencing is very different than multi tasking. This misbelief has led to aircraft accidents. It could be possible that the main component this human limitation is cognitive lockup, which is the tendency of operators to deal with disturbances sequentially. Cognitive lockup can also be defined as holding on to a task or sticking to a problem, which yields a reluctance to switch to an alternative task or problem. An extremely high-profile event exemplifying this was the December 1972 EA L1011 Flight 401 accident when the crew was troubleshooting a malfunctioning landing gear indicator light.

Cognitive lockup happens when the operator focuses on an immediate threat or fault and forget the other interacting systems. Attention tunneling accompanies cognitive lockup narrowing of focus on the immediate threat to the exclusion of other simultaneous competing task demands, e.g., focus on gear light vs. flying the aircraft. Cognitive lockup also yields to emotional hijacking when brain disagree with the actual experience. The brain declares an emotional emergency, causing a reduction in the rational brain’s problem-solving capabilities. Mitigations to cognitive lockup is to recognize of separate external pressures upon pilots’ time and task. Recognition of high cognitive lockup threat during the different phases of flight and especially during critical phase of flight such as arrivals and departures. 

 

Training in recognition and skillset of positive task switching brief evaluation of task priority assessment. Development and training with decision support tools and practice apply these tools regularly in training. Cognitive lockup is not only applicable to pilots, but also to airside crew and air traffic services personnel. Human factors training is also a regulatory requirement before being assigned tasks airside to optimize the human factors interface within the concept of SHELL. 

 

 

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