SAFA Skysailor Magazine

SKY SAILOR 11 July | August 2020 Safety Management System In the coming months, you will be hearing more on something called a Safety Management System, or SMS. At present, we are getting close to completing the current draft of the SMS Manual that will be included in our Exposition documentation to be submitted in our Part 149 application. Former SAFA Board member, Peter South (WA), drafted the initial version of the SMS Manual, and the version under development expands on that work. So, what is an SMS and why is it important? Let’s take a step back and ask the question, ‘What is safety?’ The International Civil Aviation Organisa- tion (ICAO) provides their definition of safety: “Safety is the state in which risks associated with aviation activities, related to, or in direct support of an operation of aircraft, are reduced and controlled to an acceptable level." [ICAO SMM 4th Edition (Doc 9859) 2.1.2]. New Zealand’s CAA puts it more simply: “Safety is the protection from harm.” Put in another way, it is the controlled accept- ance and correct management of risk that allows an organisation to generate profit (or rather, not spending money) or continue operating. If we accept these definitions, then it can be said that an SMS is the systems and processes we put in place to manage and control risks. It is a systematic, logical and organised way to manage safety. An SMS describes how we do business, the processes and steps we take to manage risk – but it also describes other things, how the organisation’s commitment to safety is enacted, who the responsible people are and their duties, training that is available to members, and how we interact with third parties, to name just a few. There are components of an SMS that we already have, notably our Accident and Incident Reporting System. We also already manage risks at the local level by the clubs conducting appraisals of sites and managing operations at these with assistance from their Safety Officers. Why have an SMS? There are any number of reasons, the most obvious being that we have to. CASA require us to have one and it is a core require- ment of the Part 149 approval process. Yet having an SMS just to jump through a bureaucratic hoop is not a good reason, we have to recognise that every- one is responsible for safety – be it their own, other pilots’, the organisation’s and the broader public’s. Introducing a system where safety is managed and where everyone plays a part will bring us to a point where safety considerations and actions are so in- grained that it will be a natural part of our personal and organisational culture. Who will the SMS affect? It will affect everyone, from the President, Board and COO down – we all have a part to play. What will I have to do? Nothing for the moment. Keep the AIRS reports coming in as events occur. Remember, if you witness something, you should submit a report. We can handle multiple reports for a single event. What we don’t want is no reports for any event. As we further develop and implement the SMS, we will be rolling out training courses to run in our online learning platform, itself currently under development. These will be tailored to the various roles members have in our organisation. Everyone will have to complete the base-level member training. This won’t be long, onerous or hard, but will give you an understanding of what the SMS is and your role in it. We will incorporate some extra components into our database system to support the SMS. One of these is a ‘Threat and Hazard Reporting System’ (THRS). We have a prototype up and running at the moment, but this will need further development in the coming months. From there, you will be able to report to us anything that you see and you think needs fixing. That system will then integrate with a new ‘Action Tracking System’, where threats identi- fied in AIRS or THRS will be passed to other folk in SAFA for actioning and to be monitored to the point of completion. What’s in it for me? Being part of a safer com- munity, knowing everyone has your back and you have theirs. An SMS is much more than a system though. Which brings us onto one of the beating hearts of an SMS: safety culture. We want to get to the stage where we have a healthy safety culture, where everyone is managing safety effectively, reporting hazards and incidents, and making wise decisions grounded in effective training and acute awareness of risks and consequences. The journey to reach that point is a long one and we’re already travelling that road. It will take time and your participation.