Selective
Confidence Levels
Another insightful post from Helena1320
An effective Safety Management
System (SMS) is for personnel to know and understand how safe airlines and
airport operations are. Knowledge and understanding is a product of in depth
analysis of data, establishing and applying confidence levels to selective
processes and to place each component of a system in relevance to desired
outcome. Not all processes are equally safety critical for safe operations of
airport or aircraft. However, all processes are regulatory critical to regulatory
requirements for compliance. Any regulatory requirements are to conform, without
deviations, to a 100% confidence level of regulatory requirements. Regulatory
requirements do not differentiate on a scale of safe or unsafe, but
differentiate only on a scale of compliance or non-compliance. The two impact
levels of SMS are regulatory and operational.
In a regulatory system selective
confidence levels are not acceptable, since complete regulatory requirements
are fundamental to a valid operations certificate. When the regulations require
a Safety Policy to be in place, or to have an Emergency Plan in place, these
requirements have to be met for the issuance, or continuing compliance of an
operations certificate. There are no sliding scales for regulatory requirements
to be excluded based on
bias, or personal opinions. In
preparation for an audit, an enterprise has no options but to enter into an
audit with a 100% confidence level of regulatory compliance. A regulatory
impact level does not consider customer service, business competition or cost
of compliance to regulatory critical requirements. This level only considers
regulatory compliance.
On the other hand, there are
magnitudes of opportunities in the operational impact level of an SMS system to
establish selective confidence levels for operational processes. An operational
impact level considers customer satisfaction, as viewed by the customers, when
applying selective confidence levels to safety critical processes. These
processes are without beginning or end, but follows the travelling public
through their path of life experiences. Simplified, this can be said that an
airplane crash also affects the general public who did not book on that
particular flight, or who were on anther flight, or at the time was without any
travel plans. One single airplane crash, or hijacking affects the life, or
lifestyle of everyone.
Without SMS in aviation, the
confidence level of regulatory compliance and operational processes for safe
operation of airport or aircraft are unknown. In a non-SMS organization, the
confidence level is 100% certain to be completely unknown for performance of
processes applied and if these processes are skewing towards safe or unsafe
operations.
Selective confidence level is to
apply Safety Management System processes selectively to the impact of cost of safety
for each process. Some processes require a 100% confidence level not to
compromise aviation safety, while other processes, with lower safety impact, may
be acceptable with a 95% confidence level for operations performance.
Helena1320
