Safety Management Systems 101:

An Introductory Analysis
 Safety Management in Aviation:
Meeting Mandates with SMS, FOQA/FDM,
and LOQA
Of all the things it’s crucial to get right in aviation, safety management
certainly sits atop the pyramid. As an operator or a pilot, you must ensure
that you’re complying with any and all aviation regulations relevant to your
particular aircraft and region — both for the sake of the law and the safety
of yourself, your pilots, and your customers. So where do you start?

In this ebook, we’ll talk about the different aspects of safety management,
including Safety Management Systems (SMS), Flight Operations Quality
Assurance (FOQA) (also known as Flight Data Monitoring or FDM), and Line
Operations Safety Audits (LOSA). We’ll give you a rundown of why they’re
so important — and at the end, you’ll have a solid understanding of what
you need to do to meet safety mandates.

Let’s dive in.

Who makes the rules? An introduction to the

International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO)
Established in 1944, the International Civil Aviation Organization, aka the
ICAO, is a United Nations agency that works to administer, manage, and
improve upon the guidelines put in place at the Convention on International
Civil Aviation (Chicago Convention).

Out of the 195 recognised countries in the world, 192 are member states of
ICAO — a solid mandate that establishes ICAO as the foremost authority
in global aviation. These 192 countries are called ‘contracting states,’ which
means they abide by ICAO and Chicago Convention regulations.

The Montreal-based ICAO sets best-practice protocols and guidelines that

together make up aviation Standards and Recommended Practices (SARPs),
with the goal being to foster a ‘safe, efficient, secure, economically

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sustainable, and environmentally responsible civil aviation sector.’ The
organisation’s contracting states generally adopt these rules in accordance
with their own national policies, creating a worldwide aviation network
operating on the same level and with standard rules.

This global agreement broadly avoids chaos and allows for the safe and
simultaneous functioning of hundreds of thousands of flights per day, and
it’s invaluable to the aviation industry as a whole.

But how, exactly, does ICAO go about achieving this aviation harmony?

ICAO holds aviation safety as one of its fundamental strategic objectives

and devises its safety management SARPs in accordance with this high
priority. These SARPs include provisions for the implementation of the
processes known collectively as Safety Management Systems (SMS), as well
as guidelines on setting up an appropriate system within your particular
operation.

An SMS, as defined by ICAO, is a ‘systematic approach to managing safety,

including the necessary organisational structures, accountabilities, policies,
and procedures.’ It essentially demands that aviation service providers
(such as airliners, private operators, and commercial businesses) work to
proactively improve safety rather than treating it as an afterthought, in the
wake of an accident or other safety issue.

So what’s actually involved in an SMS?

Safety Management Systems (SMS)

At its core, an SMS is an exhaustive, multi-pronged approach to safety that
targets all areas of an operation to identify weak spots and correct them —
and to ensure that the operation is constantly moving toward an improved
degree of safety.

ICAO regulations mandate that, by 2019, the appropriate regulatory bodies

in member states implement measures for their respective countries’
aviation service providers to set up an SMS that appropriately addresses
the four components of a comprehensive system.

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 ICAO

National regulator

Safety Management System

Safety Safety Risk Safety Safety

Policy Management Assurance Promotion

Spidertracks 2.0
Solutions

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Safety policy comprises every process, rule, requirement, etc. that’s needed
to meet or exceed an organisation’s safety goals. These include standard
common-sense goals, as well as operation-specific aims (such as reporting
intervals).

Safety risk management and safety assurance involve putting those

policies into practice and implementing continuous monitoring and
reporting to achieve goals and to improve. (These two tenets of an SMS
concern Flight Operations Quality Assurance (FOQA) and Line Operations
Safety Audits (LOSA), which we’ll discuss in the next section.)

And safety promotion requires a culture of safety to be omnipresent in an

organisation — for all training, communication, and relevant interactions to
promote and work toward an elevated level of safety.

Basically, an effective SMS must be able to pinpoint safety risks; act

appropriately to maintain the necessary level of safety; monitor and report
on safety status; and actively work to improve safety.

The goal is for providers to operate at a level that vastly bolsters the safety
of the entire industry.

What is Flight Operations Quality

Assurance (FOQA)?

Also called flight data monitoring (FDM), FOQA is a critical component of

any SMS and involves collecting data — such as altitude, airspeed heading,
and acting forces — from an aircraft as it flies, analysing that information,
reporting on it, and using it to make safety adjustments and improvements.

It’s a fusion of quality assurance (which centers on how customers feel

about the service they’re experiencing) and safety management (which is
implemented and dealt with by the service provider). To that end, FOQA is
beneficial for both the customer and the provider. For the former, it provides
confidence in and peace of mind about the existing level of safety; and for
the latter, it increases operational efficiency and helps to minimise loss.

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 What is Line Operations Quality
Assurance (LOSA)?
While FOQA/FDM mainly focuses on addressing any existing safety risks,
LOSA focuses primarily on proactively preventing human error and any
impact it could have on safety.

It goes hand-in-hand with FOQA/FDM by using a system called ‘threat

and error management’ (TEM) to identify safety hazards and come up
with solutions to eliminate them, ultimately ensuring that your aircraft is
operating as safely as possible. The key to LOSA is using ‘trained observers’
to anonymously collect data on how pilots and flight crew deal with threats
and errors. It’s meant to be a non-judgemental, data-driven analysis of flying
habits so that operators can target areas where they need to improve.

Together, FOQA/FDM and LOSA work within the safety risk management
and safety assurance spheres of a comprehensive SMS work to establish a
superior baseline of safety — elevating that of both individual operators
and the industry as a whole.

Spidertracks as a LOSA and FOQA tool and an

SMS enabler

Spidertracks has started development work on a service called Virtual FDR

(Flight Data Recorder), which uses your Spider as an information collector to
alert you to events and safety hazards and which can be used to implement
LOSA and FOQA/FDM systems within an SMS.

The Spiders 6, 7, and 8 are already equipped with inertial measurement

unit modules, which can capture nine axes of flight data including pitch,
roll, yaw, and G to supply Virtual FDR with its data. When Virtual FDR is
released, this data can feed into your SMS, eliminating the need for manual
monitoring of SMS compliance and providing you with real-time dynamic
information that you can use to improve your operations.

Virtual FDR, along with our other upcoming developments, are designed as
awareness tools; their purpose, like everything we do here at Spidertracks,
is to provide our customers with the information and understanding they
need to make better decisions.

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The value of having the latest
Spidertracks hardware
Only our last few Spider versions (Spiders 6, 7, and 8) are compatible with
Virtual FDR and able to leverage low-cost technology advancements in
personal smart devices to deliver other upcoming features. This idea of
adding more value to the hardware that most operators already have future-
proofs aviation businesses from having to constantly upgrade expensive
and heavy legacy systems by providing them with most of the same benefits
at better cost.

That’s the value of having the latest hardware, and it’ll become more and
more important as SMS become more widely adopted. We hope this ebook
has been helpful to you in gaining a bit more knowledge about the state
of safety management in aviation today — and to learn more about how
Spidertracks can help your business, please contact us at any time.