A Study of Challenges to the Success of the Safety Management System in Aircraft Maintenance Organizations in Turkey

The ICAO is an international regulatory authority put in place, in addition to current prescriptive regulatory approaches based on regulatory compliance that use reactive tools, performance based approaches that focus on, processes, proactivity, productivity and safety performance, to reduce the number of accidents and fatalities irrespective of the volume of air traffic. The safety management system (SMS), a product of this new approach, requires transformations which are likely to create certain challenges to its performance. This study sets out to investigate the challenges to the successful implementation of SMS in aircraft maintenance organizations, the degree of priority of these challenges, the major problems affecting the performance of SMS, the factors causing the problems, and the ensuing results. During a two-day workshop, a problem analysis was conducted with experts using the nominal group technique. At the end of the study, it was identified that 'just culture' problems would be the main challenge to the success of the SMS. It was predicted that, impairing the reporting process, these problems are likely to have an adverse impact on information acquisition within an organization, organizational learning, efficiency of predictive tools and proactivity.

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