Jason Dickstein, president of the Washington Aviation Group, advises that repair stations directly subject to EASA 145 regulations should consider implementing a Safety Management System (SMS), and to do so soon.

European Safety Management System (SMS) requirements will be enforced at the end of this year. This is not just an issue for repair stations located in the Europe Union (EU); if you work in a US-based repair station that holds EASA 145 privileges, then you should expect that you will soon need to implement an SMS.

What is a Safety Management System (SMS)?

An SMS is a set of processes intended to improve the way that a business manages safety. An SMS typically starts with high level safety policies from upper management, which are intended to reflect their commitment to safety. The safety policy is typically supplemented with safety goals that are related to the policy and are set by management to highlight the safety achievement expectations. These will often be tracked using metrics that reveal the safety achievement of the business, and that allow management to control and improve safety.

An important element of an SMS is that it features a list of safety hazards facing the business. I advise companies to start off listing the hazards that they’ve already addressed. In many cases, the policies and procedures that exist in the company are mitigating or preventing known hazards. These should all be listed as hazards – even though they’ve been previously mitigated – because listing them in your database helps the company use its SMS platform to effectively manage change.

Each of the hazards will then be subject to risk assessment. I’ve written several articles about the subject, so we won’t go into depth here, but the risk assessment helps to prioritise where safety resources need to be committed first, and also helps to identify mitigations (procedures) that reduce the risk of each hazard to an acceptable level. All those mitigations will also get listed in your database (ideally, this will include all of your existing safety procedures, which will each be connected to the hazard or hazards that the procedure mitigates).

By starting this way, your system can later be used to support change management, because when a procedure is intended to be changed, you can see what hazards it is connected to, and you can assess what affect the procedure change might have on the hazards that the procedure already mitigates.

You will then audit those mitigations to ensure firstly that they are being properly implemented, and secondly they are achieving the intended result. This audit process can reveal additional hazards, which helps to create a feedback loop to support continuous safety improvement. It can also develop data that supports the metrics that reveal the health of the system.

Finally, you will communicate the details about the system, from procedures to findings, in order to ensure that your safety efforts are successful. Making the employees a part of the system in a just culture environment is an important part of the success of an SMS.

How do EASA plans affect the US?

The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) issues SMS requirements for repair stations. All repair stations directly subject to the EASA 145 regulations will need to implement an SMS by December.

Repair stations located in the US are not directly subject to the EASA 145 regulations. Instead, they are subject to the bilateral agreement between the EU and the US. That agreement allows repair stations in the US to obtain EASA 145 privileges by obtaining an FAA Part 145 repair station certificate and then implementing additional requirements, including implementation of each of the special conditions outlined in the Maintenance Annex to the bilateral agreement.

EASA has stated to the FAA that they intend to name the SMS as a special condition to be added to the Maintenance Annex. This means that US-based repair stations will need to implement SMS programmes to retain their EASA 145 credentials.

At this time, the expectation is that US-based repair stations will not need to directly comply with the EASA 145 SMS requirements. Instead, it will be sufficient for US-based repair stations to comply with the FAA’s voluntary SMS programme.

This is not as easy as it sounds. The voluntary programme is still in development. The standards for what are considered acceptable appear to be in flux, which has led to frustration among some participants in the programme as it appears that there is no firm objective standard for what is considered to be acceptable to meet the standards for compliance in the programme.

The FAA’s Part 5 SMS requirements are used as a guideline, but they do not directly apply, as a matter of law, which means that there is an opportunity for the FAA employees to apply standards that go beyond the strict language of the SMS regulations that apply to air carriers. This makes it possible for the voluntary programme to be more onerous than a regulated programme would have been.

In practice, it appears that the standards are non-uniform because the voluntary programme standards are more likely to be subject to the discretion of individual employees at the FAA, which leads to greater variance in how the programme is implemented.

The FAA will need to rapidly establish more objective standards if it intends to accept an SMS as a special condition in the Maintenance Annex.

In addition to settling on objective standards for compliance, the FAA needs to ensure that it has adequate personnel to oversee the programme. When this was discussed late in 2023, I asked Larry Fields of the FAA whether the FAA had adequate resources to induct 1,000 additional US repair stations into the voluntary SMS programme (the approximately number of US-based EASA 145 privilege holders). He confidently said “yes” (and Larry is the kind of executive who gets things done). But this is a tremendous increase in the programme, so it will be interesting to see just how scalable the voluntary programme really is.

The size of the programme isn’t the only scalability concern. One of the fears about the application of SMS requirements to repair stations is the issue of scalability of the programme requirements to smaller repair stations. When a repair station has the resources to staff an SMS programme, then it can remain focused on using it to improve safety. But in a smaller repair station, applying the same expectations could overwhelm the small business.

Making the programme scalable to smaller businesses has always been an important point of discussion. One of the drawbacks to the FAA using a voluntary programme instead of relying on a regulated programme is that the laws that protect small businesses against overwhelming regulations do not protect small businesses against ‘voluntary programmes’.

Support and guidance

There are some resources available to help support small businesses that want SMS guidance. SM‑0001 is an SMS guidance that was written mostly by the manufacturing community. At present, it is unwieldy to apply directly to a repair station, but it still offers some useful guidance and ideas. A maintenance subcommittee is drafting revisions that will implement EASA 145 requirements and will also update the language to better reflect the needs of the maintenance community.

I’ve written articles for MRO Management and for others on how to build and start using an SMS programme (even in a small business). There are links to the articles on the MARPA website.

This feature was first published in MRO Management – April 2024. To read the magazine in full, click here.