SMS Foundations

A Safety Management System (SMS) is a formal, top-down, organization-wide approach to managing safety risk and assuring the effectiveness of safety risk controls. SMS is recognized by ICAO, the FAA, and civil aviation authorities worldwide as the standard for aviation safety management.

At Dolphin Atlantic, our SMS is how we identify hazards before they become incidents, manage risk systematically, and continuously improve our safety performance — across both the EMB-505 and EMB-550 operations.

Safety is accomplished through a continuing process of:

1. Hazard identification
2. Safety risk management

While eliminating accidents entirely remains the ultimate goal, it is recognized that the aviation system will never be completely free of hazards. As long as safety risks are kept within an appropriate level of control, aviation operations can maintain a balance between production and protection.

Hazards can result in injury, illness, or death to people; damage to or loss of a system, equipment, or property; or damage to the operating environment.

Many hazards arise from human error. Common contributing factors include:

• Time pressures and workload
• Poor procedures and documentation
• Inadequate teamwork or crew briefings
• Poor fatigue management
• Lack of system knowledge
• Operator error in a Human-Machine Interface
• Group norms that influence values or culture

Hazards exist at all levels of an organization but they can be identified and mitigated. The goal is to identify hazards before they interact with triggering factors and produce a mishap.

At Dolphin Atlantic, we use several methods to identify hazards proactively:

• Voluntary hazard and incident reporting — anyone can submit a safety report at any time. This is the most important tool we have.
• Observations and audit findings — systematic review during internal and external audits
• Investigation report review — analyzing what indirect factors contributed to past events
• Flight Risk Assessment Tool (FRAT) — pre-flight risk scoring for flight operations

The Risk Matrix is a key tool for assessing risk. It plots likelihood against severity to produce a risk level — typically Low, Medium, or High — which guides the appropriate level of corrective action.

Every SMS is built on four interrelated components. All four must be present and functioning to have an effective safety program:

Safety Risk Management (SRM) is the formal process by which Dolphin Atlantic identifies and controls hazards. The process has four steps:

1. Describe the system — understand what operation or change is being assessed
2. Identify the hazards — what could go wrong?
3. Assess and analyze the risk — how likely, and how severe?
4. Control the risk — what mitigation brings risk to an acceptable level?

Once risk controls are implemented, their effectiveness must be monitored. If a control is not working, the SRM process begins again.

The goal is to eliminate risk or mitigate it to an acceptable level — balanced against the time, cost, and difficulty of mitigation measures. Risks should be managed to the lowest practicable level.

Safety Assurance (SA) assesses the safety effectiveness of Dolphin Atlantic's operations and enables continuous improvement by:

• Monitoring, measuring, and reviewing safety performance indicators
• Managing changes in the system (Management of Change process)
• Continuously improving the safety system based on findings

SA gives us confidence that our SMS is meeting our safety objectives and that our risk controls are actually working — not just on paper.

Safety Promotion ensures all employees have familiarity with risk control concepts, safety awareness, and their individual responsibilities. The two key areas of Safety Promotion are:

• Training — initial and recurrent SMS training for all personnel
• Communication — Safety Bulletins, Safety Alerts, and Safety Notices that keep everyone informed