When will airlines start preparing safety cases?

[PEI_3721]

Aviation safety stalled.

SM, within this thread, are you suggesting that this is due to the lack of SMS, or is SMS proposed as the solution?

Stalled – at what level. The fatal accident rate appears to remain low, hull losses similar, but at a higher rate. Of concern (Boeing Stat Sum) is that the overall accident rate shows a slight increase, but all of these values are ‘relatively’ low. Naturally, rates depend on how they are defined, and that their relative success (acceptability) depends on what minimum might be achievable (ALARP).

If the very low accident rate is an indication of an ‘almost totally safe transport system’ - The paradoxes of almost totally safe transportation systems (Amalberti), then the safety task has to adapt from improvement to containment.

SMS might target those areas with less than the general standard of safety - improvement, but those operations which have achieved an acceptable level should focus on safety programs for containment, if not already done so. Will SMS contain what is already achieved; not necessarily so?

A counter view is that SMS auditing and monitoring will help containment, but only if the key safety items are identified. Many audits (SMS activities) only see what is looked at: – in how many of the recent accidents were the major contributors identifiable by conventional SMS auditing – beware hindsight bias.
Instead of looking for hazards, we should look for the changes in operation; look at the difference between how the tasks are undertaken vs how management thinks they are (perhaps these are the real hazards).
Improving safety culture is a good idea, but it is a lengthy process and success is not assured.

Many interpretations of SMS see it as an idealized concept (ICAO SMM Chapter 1); it is guidance to be built upon.
Many airlines have good systems; these are containing the accident rate at low levels. The important item which has to be identified - avoided - is the ‘big one’.
Thus why not look at the successes in the industry, how the successful (safe) operators achieve containment both with management and in practice at the workface, as opposed to how the regulators think that safety should be achieved in concept