Mitigating Risk – Safety Management Systems & Risk Management

SMS or safety management systems are an integral part of the airworthiness management function; we need to evaluate our known risk’s and ensure that we mitigate them and manage them to an acceptable level.

There will always be occurrences and the important factor is to capture them and then risk assess each occurrence or near miss. The more reports the safety management system gets then then more we can prepare for the risk that we face.

There are also controlling measures that we can put in place to reduce risk in many cases – the controlling measure is designed that it can allow a risk to exist, but we lower the value of the assessed risk to an acceptable or preferable level.

The control measures are commonly referred to in a hierarchy of is a list of the most preferable through to the least with regards to risk. If course to eliminate risk is the aim, but in reality, this is commonly not possible for many reasons including commercial factors

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Aircraft Reliability – Aircraft Engine Considerations

The engines fitted to an aircraft can often be one of the single most valuable assets and they are alsoone of the most complex.
It is important that the engines are maintained and monitored; the conditions the engines operate in means that while we can try to preserve life with actions such as reduced thrust take off’s where possible, there is also items we can not control such as the weather or animals in the air.

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Aircraft Reliability – Analysis and Considerations

As we operate our aircraft, we need to maintain oversight of the reliability of the aircraft – the reliability can indicate areas where we might want to improve such as reducing intervals between tasks being carried out or not problems that occur regularly.

Once we have decided the sources for data, we will use in the aircraft reliability programme and the considerations detailing what we will and will not include regarding maintenance actions taken – then comes the analysis of the data to allow us to create some information that has meaning or value to us.

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Aircraft Lease review – Carry forward items / deferred defects

An aircraft is maintained in an airworthy condition by many conditions being met; one of these conditions is the scheduled maintenance being completed as per the approved maintenance plan for the aircraft.

What will happen is over the operation defects arise that are recorded in a logbook, and they must be actioned or assessed to continue operation. This could be a simple change of a part, such as tyre worn and the wheel is replaced, or maybe a valve fails, and it can be replaced.

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Airworthiness Review Certificate (ARC) review.

IALTA

Last post we looked at some of the considerations regarding what an Airworthiness Review
Certificate (ARC) is.

An ARC review is performed annually, and a “full” ARC takes place every third year.

It is also worth noting that after an initial ARC review you can apply to extend the certificate without further review from the CAMO for a period of one year but that this extension can only be applied for two times and then a full review must take place. An ARC extension can only happen if the aircraft is deemed to be in a “controlled environment”.

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