Some good links there!
Maybe some more details are in order:
I am a flight safety officer for an airline which does ACMI leases for other airlines (scheduled) and so we have regularly new destinations, say 3-4 a year. I m pretty familiar with the process description of risk management, but I am trying to come up with a practical application, the nuts and bolts of it if you will...
SMS has been implemented a while now and we are pretty happy on the hazard identification side, communication to staff and management is ok as well, but we are trying to get to the next level, identifying and solving issues before they occur.
In theory risk management is supposed to accomplish this, however it is irritating to see that everyone is talking about risk management in SMS for airlines as if it is already solved.
In my opinion, the few methods we have are in childs shoes and nowhere near enough to have a proper systematic pro-active identification.
I have been involved with the ARMS working group (
SKYbrary - ARMS Methodology for Risk Assessment ) and we are starting to get to a point where we have a more realistic method to do risk assessment of safety issues.
However trying to come up with a process for new routes I realise that the main problem is to identify what issues you need to risk assess to cover most of the risk. There is a practical time limit on how many assessments you can do.
By definition a new destination is an unknown, so your own company would not have identified any safety issues from own ops, this implies in turn that you do not know where to look and need to consider a sufficiently broad spectrum of issues to identify the ones that matter. (of course some external databases like ASRS and AAIB databases might help somewhat)
The CFIT checklist is a good tool but its scope is a bit different from what I need, the CFIT Checklist is a tool that is narrow but digs deep.
The tool I am trying to build is something that looks very broad (because you have to) and dig pretty shallow. The idea is that once it identifies a serious risk it needs to be analysed more in detail anyway through other means.
I do agree with the statement that the method is not that important, as long as it gets your organisation to talk and consider about the risks involved in their operation.
But the idea is that this method at least identifies those issues that are tended to be overlooked in the first place with more informal methods.
The tool does not have to be very sophisticated, but at least put up a flag at issues you need to have a closer look at before you accept them.
Also it aims to take a bit of the randomness out of the assessments, you can't avoid that there are different persons doing these assessments, so at least they should have the same frame of reference which forces them to consider relevant issues they might not think of by themselves.