Progressive airlines, charter operators and corporate flight departments, as well as their regulatory agencies, recognize the benefits of a proactive and effective safety program:

• Effective risk management and elimination of hazards, enabling safer operations with reduced risk exposure.

• Prevention of accidents and all their consequences.

• Early identification of deviations from regulatory compliance enabling corrective action and voluntarily disclosure before regulatory intervention.

• Continual focus on quality and identification of opportunities for operational improvement.

• Financial savings from correction of problems, avoidance of civil penalties and improvement of operations.

RDSA helped airlines and other aircraft operators realize these benefits through the review and enhancement of existing safety programs or the development of new programs, with special emphasis on Safety Management Systems (SMS) that met ICAO requirements for commercial operators and private flight departments and were key requirements for the Air Charter Safety Foundation’s IAS Audit Registration and the International Business Aviation Council’s IS-BAO Certification, respectively.

The scope of our assistance varied from the creation of an entire Safety Management System to a focus on one or more of the four SMS pillars (safety policy, safety risk management, safety assurance and safety promotion) to individual safety program elements, such as:

• A safety incident/accident reporting system

• Hazard reporting and elimination

• Accident/incident investigation

• Safety audits and inspections

• Internal evaluation program

• Operational risk assessment program

• Open reporting system

• Routine monitoring and trend analysis program

• External evaluation programs

• Organization of the safety program and safety committee and assignment of staff responsibilities

• Employee education and training in safety and accident prevention

• Creation of an overall safety culture in the organization