Safety Is Our Business - Safety Management System

By Joe Schanne

The new FAA tagline says it all - “Bringing Safety to America ’s Skies.” The number one priority at the FAA is ensuring the safety of the National Airspace System. Ask the passenger sitting next to you on your next flight his/her top concern regarding air travel, and, he or she will most definitely agree. At the FAA, safety is our business and it is what keeps us in business.

With all of this focus on safety, we need to make sure we have a way to effectively manage the various safety efforts planned and underway. To that end, the ATO is implementing a Safety Management System (SMS). The SMS provides a systematic and integrated method for managing the safety of air traffic control (ATC) and navigation services in the NAS. It integrates current FAA safety-related operational policies, processes, and procedures, as well as introduces new elements necessary for a systems approach to managing safety risk.

The great majority of the components that make up the SMS aren’t new. They are the activities that we’ve been doing for years that have made the U.S. National Airspace System (NAS) the world’s safest airspace system. The SMS just integrates these existing disparate processes. The major components of the SMS are:

Policy: The SMS requirements, responsibilities, and accountabilities for system functions

Architecture: The processes, procedures, and practices used to assess changes to the NAS for safety risk and document those changes

Assurance: The processes used to monitor and ensure safety of the NAS, including evaluations and inspections, as well as safety data tracking and analysis

Safety Promotion: Communication and dissemination of safety information to strengthen the safety culture and support integration of the SMS into operations

The largest new component of SMS is known as Safety Risk Management (SRM). SRM is a methodology that ensures all hazards are identified and all associated safety risks are mitigated to an acceptable level prior to a NAS change being made. Still in its infancy, SRM already has a success story under its belt and the Technical Center played a major role.

The ATO Safety Service’s SRM Office began by supporting the Air Traffic Organization (ATO) Terminal Service with the integration of SRM into the site selection process for new air traffic control towers. SRM is now fully integrated into the site selection process that centers around analyses conducted at the Technical Center ’s Airway Facilities Tower Integration Laboratory (AFTIL) Lab. For each site selection, the AFTIL personnel bring together the experts needed to make the right decision on tower location and height. The results, which include any identified safety risks and proposed mitigations are documented in a Safety Risk Management Document (SRMD) or safety case. The ultimate result of this work will be a safer NAS.

As SRM is introduced across the ATO, it’s expected that the personnel located at the Tech Center will play a major role. For example, as part of the FAA’s Test and Evaluation (T&E) process used when introducing new NAS systems or hardware/software changes to existing NAS systems; mitigations to hazards identified as part of the SRM process will need to be verified. The verification step of the process will be facilitated by T&E efforts, largely performed by Tech Center personnel.