To reach the next level of safety, the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) today issued a final rule that requires most U.S. commercial airlines to have Safety Management Systems (SMS) in place by 2018. The rule builds on the programs many airlines already use to identify and reduce aviation risk.
SMS is the formal, top-down, organization-wide approach to managing safety risk and assuring the effectiveness of safety risk controls. SMS gives airlines 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 the risk, and verify the effectiveness of the program.
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