Over the years this individual
method of risk analysis has been
formalized for the airlines. The FARs
with their many dispatch requirements
have imposed risk analysis on the
airlines, and the results have been
excellent. Unbelievable, really. The
major airlines in the United States have
not had a passenger fatality since 2001.
The longest fatality-free period for the
majors prior to this amazing record had
barely been two years.
While FAR 121 rules that govern
major airline flying have clearly worked,
their inflexibility doesn’t apply to other
types of flying. Instead of trying to apply
airline rules, many business aviation,
and even general aviation, operators
have established their own safety
management systems (SMS). EAA is
among the organizations that apply
SMS to flight operations. The FAA has
proposed that SMS be mandatory for all
jets and transport category airplanes in
the future. Europe, Canada, and even
Bermuda are moving more quickly than
the United States to require SMS for at
least jets, and probably other types of
aircraft operations at some point.
In piston airplanes, Cirrus has been
a leader in the fundamentals of SMS
with its checklist that pops up on the
flat glass displays whenever you power
up the airplane. The Cirrus list is not as
comprehensive as an SMS should be,
and there is no requirement for a pilot
to even consider it, but it is a start in the
right direction.
At its core SMS is a quality
assurance program much like those
used by all successful manufacturers.
This may sound backward in a world
where handmade offers the illusion
of quality, but actual quality only
comes from doing everything exactly
the same way every time. This is called
process control.
When you control the process of
whatever it is you are doing, you can
then identify the source of defects in
the finished product when they occur.
If your methods are not controlled and
every step is not repeated precisely, you
can’t know if product defects are caused
by errors in your method or are merely
the result of variations in the process.
Quality and creativity are opposites.
Creativity brings together new ideas,
new materials, and new techniques
to produce something that didn’t exist
before. Quality then figures out how
to reproduce the product exactly
every time.
What experienced pilots
learned the hard way is
that avoiding the too risky
situation is the true path
to safety, and that’s why
they developed their
own personal system for
assessing risk, and avoiding
risks that are too high.
A comprehensive SMS attempts to
identify all risks in flying and then either
avoids those risks or develops a way to
mitigate the risk. In SMS speak, mitigate
means to reduce a risk to an acceptable
level. And mitigation is key to a usable
and successful SMS because no flight in
any type of aircraft can be entirely risk
free, but we need to know what those
risks are and decide before takeoff if they
are acceptable.
The heart of an SMS is the flight risk
assessment tool (FRAT) that is
completed before every flight. In other
non-aviation safety systems it’s usually
called a risk assessment tool, but few
