Development and Implementation of a Safety Management System in a Lean Airline

All stakeholders within the aviation sector are currently facing immense system changes due to implications from the future Single European Sky concept and the new requirement for a Safety Management System (SMS). At the same time, the airline industry is under great financial pressure. So, there are no margins for failure to adapt and comply with these system changes. Yet, the reported success rate of organisational change in industry is low. The MAnaging System Change in Aviation (MASCA—EU FP7 2010–2013) project addressed these industrial needs. MASCA was driven by industrial-based case studies. The change case reported on in this paper is an ongoing development and implementation of an SMS in a major European Airline. The overall objective in this industry case was to develop a SMS that will demonstrate safety performance to comply with new regulations. A new approach for human factors and safety was developed in earlier research. As part of this a system and process analysis, a concept called the System Change and Operations Evaluation (SCOPE) model was developed. The approach taken in this case was to apply the SCOPE to enhance core functionalities and further develop the airline SMS. Taking an action research approach, researchers worked closely with the airline’s safety department to support their development of the SMS and to study that system change. The MASCA research objective was to develop a theory for change which included a methodology to evaluate change to support implementation. This case contributed to the multi-case study in MASCA in which a framework for evaluating change emerged, called the Structured Enquiry (SE). The SE was applied to provide complementary recommendations to the proposed enhanced SMS. The SE provided support to the fact that, even if all the pieces are in place required for a compliant SMS, many other essential areas need to be addressed to make all the pieces work together, such as information and knowledge cycles and social relations building teams and trust. Results show benefits of combining SCOPE and SE in system change in aviation in order to encompass identified essential components for safety performance and increasing the chances for a successful change.