Safety Management Systems (SMSs), popular in other industries for years, are coming to aviation because regulatory authorities, safety experts and industry leaders have proclaimed that SMS represents the future of safety management in our industry. Other countries have been working with safety management systems for years, and the SMS is now gaining traction in the U.S. SMSs provide organizations with a powerful framework of safety philosophy, tools and methodologies that improve their ability to understand, construct and manage proactive safety systems.
In the past, aviation safety improvement was characterized by a fly-fix-fly approach. We would fly airplanes, they would crash occasionally, and we would investigate the cause(s) to prevent it from happening again. Sometimes the causes would be related to weather or mechanical failure, but more often investigators would determine the cause to be human error–usually the pilot. Essentially, the philosophy at that time was that once the cause was determined to be the pilot, we simply needed to encourage other pilots not to make the same mistakes. That might be a bit of an oversimplification, but not much.
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