Safety Management System

If minor incident occurs when a piece of equipment bumps into an aircraft and 5 cm of its fuselage is damaged, the damage amounts to approximately CZK 2 million. A single jet motor fan blade has the same value as a mid-size personal vehicle. The price of a new aircraft reaches into the billions. The catalogue price of a mid-size aircraft (Boeing 737, Airbus 320) is between CZK 1 – 1.7 billion, the cost of a long-haul aircraft may reach up to CZK 6 billion a piece, equal to 17 thousand midrange automobiles. Safety policy protects not only these values. The greatest value it is concerned with is the health and lives of passengers and employees.

An individual is not adequate to the task – there must be a system in place

The pace of life today is fast. Life is complex and that makes heightened sensitivity to anything which might endanger operational safety just that much more important. Risk is all around us, present in any human activity. The more complex the activity is, the more risk it brings. Airport operation is very complex. It is not possible for a single person or a single organizational unit to cover and manage all these risks. Managing risk requires input from a number of experts in many fields of air traffic operation. It requires a system, in this case a Safety Management System (SMS). Letiště Praha created such a system with participation from a group of professionals from Letiště Praha, a. s. and organizations which operate at the airport and impact the level of safety. These include airlines, handling companies and Air Navigation Services of the Czech Republic.

Safety Management System (SMS)

SMS represents an active, systematic approach to airport operational safety issues and aims to increase safety in a targeted and systematic way. This means actively seeking out potential risks and minimizing those risks which have been defined and could lead to personal injuries or damage to property. To achieve this objective, predictive methods (safety studies) are used along with proactive (audits and inspections) and reactive (investigation of causes of events) approaches.

What sets aviation apart is the way it analyses the causes of every negative event in great detail, learns lessons and reduces risks of a future repeat. The causes behind events are rarely simple and usually stem from multiple causes. In 99.9% cases, an event is caused by a number of minor errors, any one of which would never have caused the incident by itself. They are minor issues we face every day or errors we make on a daily basis. If the Safety Management System ever ceased proper functioning and these minor issues began to stack up...

The thing is to find all the risks

The ideal is to find out about potential risks long before they have had a chance to appear during operations. Safety studies are done to uncover them. All proposed changes in procedure and infrastructure are assessed from an operational safety point of view well before they are introduced. If unacceptable safety risks are present, the proposed changes will not be introduced.

In real-world operation, operational employees represent the most significant link in the SMS chain, because they are closest to operations. Employees know from their training sessions that it is their eyes which are key for SMS. They are instructed to watch their surroundings carefully and if they see anything in breach of regulations, procedures or which generally breaches operational safety, to report it to their superiors or directly to safety@prg.aero.

Safety risks are uncovered not only by employee reports but also via safety audits and inspections. These are used to continuously assess all operational processes in terms of safety and to help in issuing remedial measures.

It is important to recognize risks and eliminate them, or, at least, prevent a chain reaction. Risks are all around us, not only in aviation but in all human activity. It is impossible to avoid them totally but the operational Safety Management System may eliminate a number of them and diminish those that remain, allowing for monitoring and management, in short, for keeping risks under control. That makes the airport a safe place for aircraft, passengers and the employees who work there.

Letiště Praha, a. s. (Prague Airport)

Department of Quality, Safety and Processes Management

safety@prg.aero