Assessing and Advancing Safety Management in Aviation

A safety management system (SMS) is the overall set of procedures, documentation, and knowledge systems as well as the processes using them, which are employed within an organisation to control and improve its safety performance. Safety management systems are often observed as being bureaucratic, distinct from actual operations, and being too much focused on the prevention of deviations from procedures rather than on the effective support of safety in the real operational context. The soft parts of advancing safety in organisations, such as the multitude of interrelations and the informal aspects in an organisation that influence safety, are often only considered to a limited extent. As a way forward, this paper presents two coupled approaches. Firstly, a generic tool for assessing the maturity of safety management of aviation organisations is presented, which accounts for recent insights in effectively incorporating human factors. This assessment tool provides insight into the strong and weak topics of an organisation’s SMS. Secondly, an overview is given of a range of approaches that aim to improve the safety of aviation organisations by strengthening relevant organisational processes and structures, with a focus on human factors. The relations of these approaches with SMS are discussed, and the links with topics of the SMS maturity assessment tool are highlighted.