Aviation Safety Management Systems (SMS) New Features by SMS Pro

Jan. 6, 2013 - PRLog -- Aviation safety management systems in 2013 incrementally evolve as airlines and airports increase budgets for Web based safety software systems. SMS Pro™, developed by the Web design company NorthWest Data Solutions (http://nwds-ak.com) in Anchorage, Alaska is a pioneer of Web based safety software. SMS Pro's features cover the entire range of ICAO requirements as documented in ICAO's document 9859. As of 2013, there are approximately 62 aviation safety modules in SMS Pro™. See http://www.asms-pro.com.

At the heart of every aviation safety management system is incident and accident reporting. SMS Pro™ leads the field of aviation safety software when it comes to flexibility and the ability to tailor incident and accident reports to an airline or airport's operations. To understand a major enhancement in SMS Pro™ that will be released next few weeks, it is important to have an understanding of the workflow for airline and airport incident and accident reporting. http://www.aviation-sms.com

For Web based systems, when a user reports an incident or an accident, email or text notifications are sent to safety managers who can then conduct an initial investigation, perform a risk assessment, assign the incident or accident to a responsible manager, and then classify (categorize) the reported incident to facilitate future risk analyses. The above represents the workflow of modern aviation safety management systems in the most rudimentary steps.

The workflow above satisfies most civil aviation authorities, but Transport Canada auditors have been increasingly cracking down on reported incidents that may have been closed without ever being assigned to a responsible manager. CEO Christopher Howell, of NorthWest Data Solutions, states that "it was our intention that every issue should be assigned to a responsible manager. This responsibility is very important and facilitates future follow-up and/or review process. We naturally assumed safety managers would assign responsible mangers to incidents and issues when they performed their risk assessments and classified issues. After five years, we realize our assumptions were incorrect and the the Transport Canada findings are correct."

SMS Pro™ aviation safety software will rectify this oversight and assign a default responsible manager to reported issues as soon as they are reported. Initial notifications of incidents and accidents will remain unchanged, however, the safety managers will be required to change the responsible manager whenever necessary. This new feature will serve as a corrective action for the Transport Canada findings.

Christopher Howell expects the new feature to be included in all versions of the aviation SMS software by the end of January, 2013.