Evaluating effectiveness of aircraft maintenance safety management system to reduce human errors

Safety Management System (SMS) is an advanced, top-down aviation process for managing safety risks in aviation industry. It provides a systemic approach to manage safety, develop or evaluate an aviation organizational structure, establish accountability systems, guiding policies and working procedures. International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) demands from all aviation industries to implement SMS with the same level of priority that other core processes are managed. Present research was focused on reviewing critical principles, practices and application of SMS framework and how to eradicate human errors in aircraft maintenance through identification of hazards and launch of a risk management process. Implementation SMS in aviation organization was also investigated to establish the limitations as well as advantages gained in terms of outcomes of its implementation. Data from failed quality reports for various inspections during a specific period were collected for that organization. Analysis showed that most of the human errors committed during maintenance were personality based due to poor work ethics followed by training based errors. Personality and work ethics based errors were found to have 72.3% contribution to total errors. It was followed by Training based errors at 15.76% whereas, Organizational factors contributed to 11.92% of the total errors. After this, risk factor analysis was also carried out which showed that 8.83% errors fell in the Intolerable severity level, Tolerable region had a total of 56.73% and remaining 34.41% were part of the Acceptable errors category. As a result of this analysis a risk mitigation strategy was proposed for the organization under study. Similar studies could be conducted in other aviation organizations to assess and evaluate the implementation of SMS.