In an effort to make already-safe airlines even safer, the FAA yesterday issued a final rule requiring most U.S. carriers to create formal safety management systems (SMS) by 2018.
Many airlines have already voluntarily created SMS programs, which include formal, top-down, organization-wide approaches to managing safety risk. An SMS gives an airline a set of business processes and management tools to examine data gathered from everyday operations, isolate trends that may be precursors to incidents or accidents, take steps to mitigate risk, and verify the effectiveness of the program.
