Proposed New Rule: Part 100 Safety Management Systems

Table of suggested allowable senior person combinations.
See page 6 of the ASMS submission for details.

On 8 May 2015 the CAA issued Notice of Proposed Rule Making NPRM 15-02 Part 100 Safety Management together with draft advisory circular AC100-1 Safety Management. The proposed new Rule Part 100 provides a basic outline of the requirements for a Safety Management System (SMS), with most of the detail provided in the supporting advisory circular. Consequential changes to most certification rules would see almost all certificated operators required to implement an SMS within three years.

Aviation Safety Management Systems Ltd (ASMS) supports the proposed rule. Our submission covers a range of topics intended to contribute to both improvement of the proposed rule and advisory circular, and contribute to a better understanding of the role of SMS.

There is some confusion over the extent to which employment health and safety legislation addresses risks to the safety of persons other than employees (i.e. passengers, visitors, and members of the public). Our submission demonstrates that New Zealand employment health and safety legislation includes these risks, and employers have been prosecuted for not meeting their obligations to ensure the safety of people who are not employees.

We briefly discuss SMS in other (non-aviation) sectors, including the regulations applying to Adventure Activities, and the ACC Workplace Safety Management Practices (WSMP) programme. While WSMP accreditation could not be a replacement for CAA’s own surveillance, it could be used as a significant risk indicator within CAA’s risk-based regulation framework, providing a positive indicator of reduced risk.

An important implementation issue is the question of who should hold the role of Safety Manager). We examine this question for 6 operators that we are associated with, focussing on what senior personnel are best placed to perform the role and noting that quality assurance is included within the Safety Manager role. We recommend that the position of senior person responsible for quality assurance is reinstated, and that the draft advisory circular be revised to indicate how the various roles of Chief Executive, Operations Manager, Safety Manager, Occurrence Investigation, and Quality Assurance can (and cannot) be combined.

We also provide a number of comments on the draft advisory circular. We note that setting safety goals is often extremely difficult, and recommend providing additional guidance on this point. We also comment on the interface with other management systems and suggest that fatigue risk management is no different to managing the risk of alcohol and drugs, and neither these areas nor health and safety generally should be seen as separate from SMS. Viewing each of these areas as separate creates a risk of fragmentation of systems and reduced effectiveness in addressing the relevant hazards.