With air travel expected to increase in the coming decades, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is looking at ways to apply the principles of Safety Management Systems (SMS)—used successfully in other industries—to help the aviation industry anticipate, plan for, and mitigate safety risks.
Booz Allen Hamilton Associates Jonathan Archer and David Emanuel, both based in the One Dulles office, have had many years of working in aviation safety. Jonathan has over seventeen years of diverse design and manufacturing experience in the aviation industry. He has a background in Systems Engineering and is skilled in avionics system integration, safety, and certification management, including risk and technical management.
David was an airline captain in commercial aviation for over ten years. During that time, he also held the roles of Director of Air Traffic and Flight Technical Services for a number of different airlines before coming to Booz Allen, where he supports the FAA’s Office of Safety. Jonathan and David spoke with boozallen.com about this important issue.
David Emanuel: Oddly enough a big challenge stems from the fact that aviation in the United States is considered very safe, so selling the expense of additional safety measures can be difficult. Traditionally, it's far easier to spend money after an accident to prevent it from happening again. It's harder to calculate a return on investment to prevent something that may never happen. But we believe that traditional—reactive—ways of dealing with aviation safety may have reached their limits.
Jonathan Archer: Another big challenge is the increasingly widespread use of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS). We are familiar with the unmanned drones used in military operations, but unmanned vehicles have a broad array of uses—by police departments, customs and border patrol agencies, government organizations with geographic or mapping missions, environmental agencies, industry, even academia. They vary in size from two or three pounds to having wingspans as wide as a 737. There are few regulations governing the use of these vehicles and they share the same airspace as commercial airliners.
Jonathan: Since about 1998, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the world's governing aviation body, has been looking at ways to improve safety and reduce accidents. In 2006 ICAO issued a Safety Management Manual (SMM) describing the concepts and practices for SMS. This approach is now the foundation for SMS being adopted by the major National Aviation Authorities (NAAs) around the world.
David: The FAA has issued proposed rules for applying SMS practices to aviation operators and maintenance personnel. The agency is also interested in how SMS could work at the designer and manufacturer (D&M) level as well. And they are trying to establish an acceptable level of safety to allow unmanned air vehicles to be used. If the legislation goes ahead as planned, the whole aviation industry will be covered by SMS rule making.
Jonathan: We mentioned that most safety measures are reactive—put in place after an incident. SMS takes a proactive approach for identifying the potential hazards, assessing risk, and putting controls in place to prevent accidents or lessen their effects. SMS requires an organization to develop safety policy, safety promotion, safety risk management, and safety assurance processes. In its simplest form, SMS processes are used to review how an organization does business, considering what could go wrong, identifying potential accidents and incidents, and stopping them from happening.
David: SMS is about changing a culture. It’s a business decision that requires a new mindset about approaching safety and risk. The goal is to be forward-looking in accident prevention. SMS has been used successfully in the nuclear industry to help prevent accidents at power plants. Hospitals, too, have instituted SMS practices to address the issue of surgical errors. We believe that SMS could be just as effective in the aviation industry by making safety more intrinsic to every part of a business.
Jonathan: We've been helping the FAA develop and launch a pilot project implementing a voluntary SMS framework into the aircraft design and manufacturing (D&M) community to test potential rule-making language. Booz Allen supports the FAA Aviation Certification Service (AIR) with subject matter experts who have aviation safety and risk management, facilitation, and project management skills.
David: Booz Allen is also leading a program to help FAA inspectors change the way they inspect aircraft. And we’ve been helping the individual entities across FAA harmonize their risk analysis process, so that the entire agency has a consistent understanding of SMS.
Jonathan: Another important aspect of Booz Allen’s experience is that, because we have worked extensively across government and industry, we are able to bring a depth and breadth of insight into both the private and public sectors. We also understand the regulatory environment that our commercial clients are dealing in.
David: During an FAA-sponsored event, a major airline announced that they are using SMS to help them study ways to reduce incidents and accidents around an airplane, starting with how baggage is handled. Working with the baggage handlers, the company identified a number of job improvements that reduced personal injuries and damage to equipment and the plane itself.
Jonathan: The review of baggage handling alone saved the company money–the process was made safer, there were fewer accidents, fewer sick days, and fewer times contractors had to be brought in to cover absentee staff. So you can see in that one small example how SMS can affect the way a business is run. If you apply those practices across an airline, the benefit could be huge.
