Safety management systems (SMS), long a staple of airline safety programs, can be scaled back and simplified to accommodate even single-aircraft, single-pilot operations, safety experts told attendees of Flight Safety Foundation’s Business Aviation Safety Summit (BASS) on Thursday.
“You don’t have to have a complex system,” Tiffany LaTour, an assistant manager of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s SMS Program Office, said during the closing session of the 66th annual BASS, presented by the Foundation in partnership with the National Business Aviation Association. “You can have a notebook. If you’re a one-person operation, you need a safety mindset. You can have four pages in a little binder. That’s it.”
LaTour and a colleague, Thomas Rau, also an assistant manager of the SMS Program Office, said scalability is a key advantage of SMS, which each operator can design, depending on what type of data the operator wants to gather and how aggressive the company…
