Abstract
The introduction of a safety management system (SMS) in the real operational environment has become a key factor in a proactive view of flight safety. The deep cultural change and effort that the application of an SMS requires, at economical and organisational level, has led to a delay in the definition of shared mandatory guidelines by the international civil aviation authorities. At present, the majority of attempts to develop an SMS are the result of the efforts of single organisations and operators. This paper describes a methodology aimed at practical and straightforward implementations of risk assessment processes and able to tackle real problems. The application process might be used as guideline for the analysis of critical activities resulting from retrospective and prospective assessments of operational environments. The results obtained for a sample case, based on a real “change situation” occurring in a medium size flight operator, demonstrate how the process is carried out and how to highlight and deal with the underlining critical threats and hazards that require immediate action in order to guarantee acceptable safe operational levels. These include the definition of corrective actions and the identification of responsible persons to monitor the activities designated to mitigate the associated risk.
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Acknowledgments
The authors are in debt with the members of the research team of the MASCA Project. The MASCA project has received funding from the European Commission Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under Grant agreement No. 266423. An important support work of data collection and analysis has been carried out in two Master Theses of the Politecnico of Milan. The authors are grateful the C. Mariani and A. De Col for their detailed and skilled work of data analysis.
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A. Ottomaniello is currently working at SW Italia, Safety Department
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Cacciabue, P.C., Cassani, M., Licata, V. et al. A practical approach to assess risk in aviation domains for safety management systems. Cogn Tech Work 17, 249–267 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-014-0294-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-014-0294-y