The Need for Ethics and Good Leadership as the Foundation for Aviation SMS Programs: Have we Forgotten Something?

Safety Management Systems (SMS) in aviation is now mandated in the US by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). While SMS brings with it a strong safety standard in the areas of Safety Policy, Safety Promotion, Safety Risk Management (RM) and Safety Assurance for all aviation organizations using it, at the same time it can become potentially vulnerable to accidents and incidents from a historical conflict between economic decision making (DM) and safety DM. The researchers point out the dangers of this dilemma through the example of the Alaskan Airlines door plug decompression accident of 2024 where Boeing made the decision to eliminate many of their quality assurance inspectors on the 737 Max assembly line in favor of technology. The researchers note that while the standardized SMS themes represent 4 legs on the SMS table, the tabletop that holds the SMS together is accountability. Accountability from top management, accountability from every employee and accountability of the organization through its just culture. The researchers then commence an analysis by using a Human Factors Analysis and Classification Systems (HFACS) to demonstrate how SMS accountability and the DM is constantly being challenged by revenue service accountability and DM from levels of leadership to every employee and the organization’s culture. From the HFACS analysis the researchers determined that the SMS accountability and the DM on all levels of the organization need to be influenced by ethics and good leadership in some kind of human factors training intervention to prevent the human error of the wrong DM. To help substantiate this is an organizational influenced human factors training issue, the researchers complete a historical analysis of safety reporting systems as they relate to both proactive safety programs, SMS and aviation human factors. The historical analysis points to both RM safety programs and human factors playing significant roles with safety reporting systems in making the US commercial aviation industry proactively safer. It also shows that SMS and human factors complement another to eventually merge to reduce human error and increase efficiencies. This integration of SMS and human factors is significant toward what is missing in SMS in the form of organizational human factors training and specifically ethics and good leadership training toward better DM and stronger SMS accountability. Survey data from a graduate level SMS course with ethics and good leadership in it was analyzed with favorable results.