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Safety Risk Management is Essential for Accident Prevention

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In the 2020 Safety Report, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) outlined yearly accident statistics that indicate an increase in both the total number of accidents as well as the global accident rate in 2019 for scheduled commercial aircraft operations. From 2018 to 2019, there was a 16% increase in the total number of accidents and a 12% increase in the global accident rate. Five high-risk categories (HRCs) of occurrence that accounted for majority of the accidents include controlled flight into terrain (CFIT), loss of control in-flight (LOC-I), mid-air collision (MAC), runway excursion (RE), and runway incursion (RI).

Airlines have a Safety Management System (SMS), as mandated by various regulatory authorities such as the ICAO and FAA, in efforts to establish a structured process for finding and correcting safety issues before they result in accidents. Safety Risk Management (SRM) is one of the four pillars of SMS with a focus on identifying, assessing, and controlling risks. With the recent increase in accident rate, it is prudent for airlines to re-evaluate their SRM processes as SRM has a significant role in reducing accidents and improving overall operational safety. Below are some factors airlines should consider when reviewing their SRM processes for effectiveness:

 

Key Elements of Safety Risk Management

  • Hazard Identification –  A hazard is anything that poses a risk to operations and has the potential to cause damage. Risk is inevitable in the aviation industry, so it is important for airlines to be fully aware of the risk their operations are exposed to in order to effectively mitigate it to an acceptable level. There are several methods that airlines employ to identify hazards, but the most common sources are safety reports and internal/external audits and investigations.
  • Risk Assessment – Once a hazard is identified, airlines must perform a risk assessment to determine the level of risk. An experienced analyst at the airline should perform the risk assessment using formal techniques to determine the severity and the likelihood of an occurrence. If the risk is at an acceptable level, airlines may proceed without any intervention. However, if the risk is not at an acceptable level, the airline must establish risk controls for mitigation. If a hazard poses a serious risk to operations, the risk assessment process may also prompt a more detailed investigation to drill down to the root cause.
  • Risk Control – When a risk is at an unacceptable level, airlines must take the right course of action to mitigate the risk. Airlines must determine the scale of this measure and consider whether issuing a corrective or preventive action to remedy the particular risk at hand would be sufficient or if a fundamental policy or procedural change is required. After implementing a risk control, airlines should continuously monitor baseline and mitigated risk assessment scores to ensure that the risk was mitigated to an acceptable level. Airlines should regularly evaluate the risk control’s effectiveness in mitigating risk.

 

Safety Risk Management Approaches

There are various approaches in safety risk management, including reactive, proactive, and predictive. Historically, the aviation industry has mainly employed a reactive approach which involves simply responding to and investigating incidents. Proactive risk management facilitates the identification of hazards and assessment of associated risks before they materialize into incidents. This allows airlines to reduce and control any risk before it escalates to an unacceptable level. Predictive safety management facilitates the identification of hazards based on normal operational data. This involves airlines utilizing all the safety data collected to retrieve insights on what is happening in normal day-to-day operations. With this insight, airlines can predict potential risks and reduce the likelihood of an occurrence. Over the past few years, the industry has experienced a major shift from a reactive approach to a more holistic process to incorporate all three approaches. Airlines should ensure that their SRM process reflects a holistic process with all three approaches as well.

 

Safety Risk Management Software

Safety risk management software can automate the SRM process for airlines, from risk identification to mitigation. It will equip airlines with the essential tools to perform safety risk assessments and monitor risk controls in a central location. It can also increase visibility of operational risks and help airlines drill down to the root cause of the hazard.

An advanced risk management system can provide robust analytics for airlines to monitor KPIs. Analytics contribute to a strong safety culture and facilitate a predictive approach to safety management. By retrieving insights on daily operational data, airlines can predict and prevent potential incidents, which saves time and costs associated with the occurrence of an incident.

Most importantly, a robust risk management system can be integrated with safety reporting, audit, and quality management systems to provide a holistic overview of safety data in an enterprise safety management system.

 

Conclusion

The aviation industry is inevitably prone to risk. Airlines must ensure that they are fully aware of all the hazards that pose a risk to its operations so that they can contain it to an acceptable level. With the right framework and tools, airlines will have an effective SRM process that can help reduce the number of incidents and improve operational safety.

 

A Robust SMS is a Must During COVID-19 and Beyond

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The novel COVID-19 global pandemic has introduced unimaginable challenges for airlines and  forced them to drastically change their operations, from implementing new cleaning and screening protocols to restricting the number of passengers onboard. With the significant drop in passenger travel, airlines have resorted to downsizing to stay afloat, resulting in organizational restructuring. Change is inevitably accompanied by risk, but the pandemic has presented an overwhelming number of risks, which is compounded by the reduction in resources. With more issues to address and fewer resources, it is prudent for airlines to optimize their Safety Management System (SMS) to stabilize their operations and ensure safety during these unprecedented times.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, airlines need to create new reporting templates or modify existing ones to capture COVID-19 hazards, such as flight crew fatigue due to increased screening protocols, passengers without a mask, suspected cases of COVID-19, and other related risks. Airlines need to examine their tools and systems to ensure that they have an optimum platform that allows them to capture these new risks. The SMS software should be flexible to adapt to the airline’s workflow and business processes, as well as accommodate evolving needs. The software should be configurable to support the creation and modification of templates, taxonomy, and risk matrices. It is integral that the SMS platform is user friendly to allow staff with varying levels of technical comfort to easily submit safety reports. An intuitive system that can be navigated with minimal training is also beneficial for external stakeholders, such as analysts and auditors, to use the system. With staff performing various tasks, the SMS software should support multiple users at once, be accessible across all devices and browsers, and accommodate functionality in a mobile and offline capacity to enable staff to perform their duties efficiently.

Airlines can also utilize their SMS to ensure that no safety and regulatory responsibilities were overlooked by conducting Safety Risk Assessments (SRAs) and implementing mitigation strategies. The SMS platform should provide seamless interconnectivity and transfer of data. The data needs to be linked for easy reference from the initial safety report to the corrective action and all the audits, investigations, and SRAs in between. The SMS platform should not simply capture data, but also retrieve meaningful insights, such as the ability to delineate most common root causes. Since airlines currently have limited staff and resources, this functionality relieves staff of this responsibility, making them available to tend to more critical matters.

SMS is the backbone of airline operations, so it is of paramount importance that it is continuously improved to ensure safety at all times. An optimized SMS platform will equip airlines with all the necessary tools to identify and mitigate any risks during regular operations, the COVID-19 global pandemic, and any unforeseeable circumstance that may arise in the future.

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Summary of Frequent Taxonomy in Airline SMS

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Introduction

There are multiple components that are needed for an effective Safety Management System (SMS); one of them being detailed and accurate taxonomy. In SMS, Taxonomy is a tool that is used to accurately describe safety events, hazards, human factors, etc. by providing a structured and standardized assortment of descriptive phrases and terms. This improves the quality of information and communication within an organization as there is a common language, which increases focus on safety issues within an airline.

To establish a comprehensive reporting system that provides valuable data regarding safety events, taxonomies are critical for airline SMS. Through our years of experience in implementing various taxonomies for a variety of airlines, we have become familiar with taxonomies that address specific elements of aviation safety event reporting. We have also discovered that airlines with successful safety programs configure different taxonomies to better meet their operational needs which enhances their safety operations. Summarized below are just a few of the many taxonomies that are most commonly utilized by airlines.

 

Airline Taxonomies

Accident/Incident Data Reporting Program – ADREP

ADREP is an ICAO taxonomy that carefully describes possible situations or subjects related to a safety event. ADREP consists of taxonomies related to Aircraft Categories, Entities and attributes, Aviation Operation, Descriptive factors, Events, Events phases, Occurrence category, Occurrence classes, Organizations/Persons, etc.

Basic categories for ADREP events are

  • Aircraft/system/component
  • Operations of the aircraft
  • Consequential events
  • Air Navigation Services
  • Aerodrome and ground aids
  • Civil Aviation Authority/administration
  • Non-compliance with regulations

 

Harmonization of European Incident Definitions Initiatives for ATM – HEIDI

HEIDI is a taxonomy designed for the Safety of Air Navigation. HEIDI taxonomy is a useful supporting tool for a cohesive approach to the reporting process. The HEIDI taxonomy covers the following aspects of safety reporting:

  • Background
  • Event Types
  • Descriptive Factors
  • Explanatory Factors
  • Classification Scheme
  • Safety Recommendations
  • Glossary

 

Threats and Errors Management – TEM

TEM, which was developed by industry safety experts and crewmembers, is a taxonomy that is convenient for event reporting for Aircraft Captains. TEM’s entire concept, while focused on human factors, is finding the possible threats that could have a negative impact on human factors in the system. TEM assumes that active threats could lead to increased personnel errors and, when compared to ADREP, TEM is more concise.

 

Human Factor Analysis and Classification System – HFACS

HFACS has the premier goal to support accident analyzing processes by discovering human factor element roles and causes directly linked to the event which later could influence accident recognition. HFACS includes four failure levels, each of these four is further divided into lower levels or categories/sub-categories.

  • Unsafe Acts consisting of Errors and Violations
  • Organizational Influences
  • Unsafe Supervisions
  • Precondition for Unsafe Acts failure levels

 

Conclusion

Taxonomies are a supporting tool in aviation reporting systems which enable airlines to better understand, define, and categorize reported events. Enabling airline personnel to properly describe and evaluate safety data is the true purpose and benefit of taxonomies.

Although taxonomies are standardized, taxonomies are most impactful when customized to meet the needs of each individual organization. It is important for airlines to adapt and modify their taxonomies according to their operation. Standard taxonomies are a great starting point because they tend to incorporate industry overlaps in common safety event descriptors, but they would not be able to fully capture all phrases or descriptions that are relevant to each airline.

For these reasons, the ProSafeT team has concluded that providing an SMS platform with the ability to reflect an airline’s particular taxonomy, and modify it as its operations change, is not just helpful but necessary for a successful safety program.

Pre-Task Risk Assessments: FRATs, ORMs and Data-Driven Decisions

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When implementing and utilizing a Safety Management System (SMS), one key element is developing and integrating the use of a pre-task risk assessment process. A key example being a Flight Risk Assessment Tool (FRAT). Every flight has some level of risk and assessing the risk before a plane is in the air can help to avoid safety incidents and ensure the success of an airline’s SMS.

 

What is a FRAT?

A FRAT consists of a series of questions with an associated risk level. When these questions are consolidated, a total risk assessment score for the flight is attained. Using the score, airlines may determine if that risk exceeds that airline’s specified risk threshold or not, thus providing a tool that allows pilots to make informed go/no-go decisions.

In summary, after using a FRAT to assess the risk, the data collected is:

  • A comprehensive risk assessment score for the flight
  • A risk profile for the different phases of the flight
  • Most relevant hazard and risk concerns in need of attention

These data points come together to give a holistic understanding of what specific risks a flight has and the levels of those risks before departure — giving the pilot key information that will assist them in making important go/no-go decisions.

 

Integrating with SMS

Integrating an airline’s FRAT with its Safety Management System (SMS) allows for enhanced data-sharing which enables airlines to cross-reference FRAT and SMS data in a central repository quickly. This integration can also provide additional insights into an airline’s organization since the airline’s SMS could provide richer analytics and reports with the incorporation of this data.

Integrating the data with various parts of an airlines SMS also allows other parties in the organization to utilize the data collected. For example, Safety Analysts will have access to this additional information which can help them to look for specific trends in various pilot’s FRAT scores while being able to correlate that information with safety reports. Thus, allowing for a more comprehensive overview of safety events which could lead to enhanced risk mitigation strategies.

 

Additional Use for FRATs

More and more airlines are seeing the benefits that pre-task risk assessments, such as FRATs, are providing and are expanding these assessments beyond preflight operations.  As part of their SMS platforms, some airlines are now ensuring that their SMS providers include an Operational Risk Management Tool (ORM) in their systems. These ORMs are structured and work very similar to that of traditional FRATs, but expand the pre-task assessments to above wing, below wing, and various other operations. These integrated ORM tools allow airlines to take charge and mitigate risk in a wide variety of scenarios, ensuring that tasks are carried out in the safest way possible while avoiding costly safety incidents and accidents.

 

Conclusion

Utilizing pre-task assessment tools within airline SMS improves airline operations. Not only are they useful for data-driven insight to assist with pre-flight decision making, but they provide cross-referenceable data that can be utilized to enhance airline operations. Integrating an airline’s FRAT and ORMs with its SMS is key to maximizing the utilization of these platform’s safety data.

Automated SMS: What are the Critical Functions for Efficiency?

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The FAA’s final rule required most U.S. commercial airlines to have an implemented Safety Management System (SMS) by March 2018.  There are many systems which allow the automation of SMS’ four key components – safety policy, safety risk management, safety promotion, and safety assurance – but distinguishing which features/functions are most needed to automate this critical operation can be difficult. In the sea of features SMS vendors provide, three features are crucial to maximizing the efficiency and effectiveness of an automated SMS.

Intuitiveness

Simply because a process has been digitized, does not guarantee that it will be more efficient.  A user-friendly SMS platform will provide intuitive navigation for end users which will maximize operational efficiencies. By reducing the number of clicks it takes to perform tasks in a system, an intuitive platform will enhance productivity and can lower labor costs.

Safety data is the engine that provides organizations with the most impactful insights for improving safety and mitigating risk.  Having an intuitive platform will ensure personnel with lower levels of comfort with technology will not be discouraged from submitting safety reports/data thus improving the system’s effectiveness. An intuitive system will also minimize the amount of training needed for end users and ease system adoption.

Unlimited Licenses

Limiting licenses leads to limited results.  Unlimited licenses allow all stakeholders to have reporting access.  With everyone being able to report through the system even the smallest safety issues will not slip through the cracks, increasing the safety promotion element of SMS.  Additionally, this creates a more holistic view of every issue as all of those who witnessed it will be able to access and complete the necessary reports, feeding further into the safety culture of the organization.

Other benefits include an increase in communication as messages sent through the system will reach all stakeholders.  Promoting safety within the organization becomes a defined focus when all stakeholders are invited to meetings and training.  Not to mention it cuts costs as airlines grow since purchasing more licenses will never be a factor.

Analytics and Easy Report Generating

The most significant part of automating SMS is using the data.  A system with analytics will allow translation of SMS Data into insight that enables airlines to identify problems and make informed decisions for the future.  This leads to a strong safety culture and makes it easy to deal in accident prevention.

Easy report generation will allow airlines many options to use the data collected without spending too much time exporting reports.  Having the data in hand in as few clicks as possible not only saves time but reduces stress and frustration caused by over-complicated report acquisition.  Being able to get the report needed, in the format preferred, in just a few clicks and a couple of minutes is imperative to not only efficiency but time management.

Conclusion

To recap, intuitive platform, unlimited licenses, and analytics/reporting capabilities are all critical elements for an automated SMS software solution.  SMS not only allows airlines a system to report safety issues, but it will enable the airline an opportunity to improve its processes through the effective use of the data collected and promote safety within their organization.  These three features attribute to this, as they allow for ease of data entry, no limits to stakeholder’s ability to enter the data, and the ability to translate that data into usable figures.  These features work together to create an efficient automated SMS and develop a strong safety culture within an organization.