Aviation is plausibly the safest mode of mass transportation. This is true, following the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) 2009 report, which emphasized that the continuous investment in safety programs has seen the aviation industry evolve from a dawning profession with a delicate safety record to the most reliable form of transport with regards to safety. Trends in the historical activity levels in the aviation community reveal a steady decrease in the frequency of safety breakdowns between 1970 through the mid-1990s to the close of the 20th century ( Alianz Global Corporate and Specialty [AGCS], 2014) . Further and more pronounced reductions have been recorded midway into the first quarter of the 21st century. During the 1950s and the early 1960s, research was focused on major accidents to identify the potential weak points in aviation safety (AGCS, 2014) . Times have changed, however, and the search for safety lessons have shifted from major accident investigations to minor incident investigations. This shift is an indication of how much the serious accidents have become infrequent and further apart, so infrequent that their occurrence is now considered an exceptional event. As a consequence, the aviation industry is viewed to be in an era of safety reliability, especially in the first quarter of the 21st century, which is characterized by the ultra-safe aviation system. ICAO describes ultra-safe as a system which experiences no more than one catastrophic safety breakdown for every one million departures ( International Civil Aviation Organization [ICAO], 2018) . The astounding reductions of the fatalities in the intervening decades can be attributed to the advent of technology, improvements in air control, and pilot training, all under the umbrella of Aviation Safety Management Systems (SMS).
The current study reviews the safety management systems (SMS) to identify the commonalities, differences, and challenges in the implementation of pilot training, air control, and use of technology and how they have contributed to the history and evolution of the aviation system as well as their implications for the future of the industry. In keeping with the above-mentioned aims, the research will:
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Make an analysis of key changes in aviation safety through different historical timelines.
Evaluate the conception of SMS
Assess the potential of utilizing technology to change the future of SMS.
Review areas of change to look for in preventing future safety concerns
Literature Review
Aviation safety, as perceived by the flying public, concentrates mainly on the cases accident while sidelining the elements that contribute to the accidents witnessed in airline operations ( ICAO, 2018) . This narrowed perception means that less is known about the elements affecting aviation safety, such as the management, operations, maintenance, design of the aircraft, the air traffic control systems, and the aviation regulations. Each one of these factors is of vital significance, and their inter-connectedness collectively contribute to the end result of a safer, more reliable transport system. ICAO (2018) further emphasized that one cannot simply assume that one contributing factor is more important than the rest, thus, aviation SMS is a working collection of several inter-dependent factors that work together to ensure continuous improvement of the airline safety.
The initial approaches to identifying the factors for aviation safety were reactive in nature. Reactive systems, just as the name suggests, respond to unanticipated incidents or accidents only after they occur. While most lessons can be learned from the occurrence of a bad situation, it gives no room for the aversion of the damages and the losses incurred. This is primarily true, considering that airlines had to channel large amounts of resources to repair the damage after it has been done. At first, it was thought that aviation safety management had no option but to identify the hazards after the damage is done. The inherent reactive paradigm made it nearly impossible to confer certainty to the flying public over their safety. SMS grew weary of the burden of loss that had to be encountered before a safety lesson was learned. With time, it was apparent that there is always an element, in isolation or in combination, which may have contributed to the occurrence of the accident. It is after the realization that accidents, whether minor or major, do not occur spontaneously that ICAO pushed for a revolution in the airline industry from a reactive response system to a proactive response system ( ICAO, 2018) .
Proactive safety management systems are designed in anticipation of possible challenges, and through this, the aviation authorities can avert major damages that would otherwise derail the industry. Proactive approaches are effective on the basis of the forecast inputs available, where based on the situation, available resources, and time availability, an aviation hazard can be eliminated before they get to manifest. However, no system is overly predictive of every future possibility. At times, the proactive measures may not work at all, and for this reason, SMS must continue combining both the reactive safety measures. Regardless, more attention is given to the proactive aspect due to the immense benefits it confers to the system.
More research by AGCS (2014) has revealed that there are significant variations in aviation safety across different regions in the world. The variations are directly related to the level of industrialization in the region, with Africa reportedly the poorest performer when it comes to the safety standards registered. In the year 2011 alone, more than 1/5 of the global accident reports came from Africa ( AGCS, 2014) . More than 50% of the African fleet comprised of second-generation aircraft, indicating that regions that have advanced in technology are less likely to suffer the fate of Africa. The continents of Africa (45%) and Asia (43%) cumulatively accounted for 88% of global fatalities ( AGCS, 2014) . These high fatality rates are potential indicators of the continent's poor performance in the future of aviation safety. This research builds on this pool of knowledge to review the key activities in the history and the evolution of safety management systems as well as the implications of the current trends to the future of aviation safety management.
Discussion
History of the Safety Management System
The aviation SMS does not have a specific point of origin in time; rather it is an evolutionary process which has been contributed to by a series of impacts from different fields of management such as the ISO 9000 quality management system (QMS) and the safety system ( Federal Aviation Administration [FAA], 2019) . Tracing the origins of the SMS is therefore made difficult by the different influences, different interpretations, and differing timelines of its implementation across different countries.
From System Safety to Safety Management System. Largely, the modern safety concepts in the aviation SMS are present in the system safety ideas of the 1960s and 1970s (FAA, 2013) . The current proactive safety management system in obviation, which entails business-like management approaches to the safety of flight operations, was not evident until the mid-1990s. Initially, however, the nature of the approach to aviation safety issues was the fragile reactive system where the emphasis was put on accident investigation to prevent the recurrence of the same incidents in the future. The system was widespread in the periods between the 1920s until 1970 (FAA, 2013) .
During this period, most of the safety approaches were guided by the tenets of system safety. System safety was not conceived by an individual; rather, it was a decision by a community of contractors, engineers, and the military to make safer designs and equipment by applying a formal approach to risk assessment and management. System Safety was started a grassroots movement during the 1940s, at a time when the approaches to safety were inherently reactive. It gathered momentum into the 1950s and was established and widespread in the 1960s before finally being formally acquired in the 1970s (FAA, 2013) .
The earliest official demonstration of system safety was made in January of 1946 by Amos Wood in the document titled The Organization of an Aircraft Manufacturer's Air Safety Program, which underscored the revolution of the aviation industry in five different ways (FAA, 2013) . These included the need for a continual focus on safety in every design aspect, advancement in the post-accident safety analysis, intense safety education, preventative designs to reduce personal errors that contribute to accidents, and the use of statistical control of post-accident analyses (FAA, 2013) . In a nutshell, the early emphasis on system design highlighted to include safety in every design aspect of the aircraft, just as it was the case with structural integrality and stability.
At the start of the system safety, it was increasingly difficult to evaluate the positive work of preventative design. It was not easy to demonstrate that a specific element of design had blocked an accident if the accident did not occur. Therefore, the need for efficiency in the system safety was motivated by the analyses and references from accident investigators. In an example, the AR 385-15 system safety report of 1963 was only published after the investigations on the US Army accident that occurred in Middletown New Jersey in 1958 (FAA, 2013) . The accident had caused immeasurable damage to property as well as the loss of lives of the members of the US Army- a loss that motivated the military review committed to pushing for the establishment of formal safety authority to review missile systems designs. This led to the publishing of the establishment of the AR 385-15 system safety (FAA, 2013) . Three years later, the explosives at the USS Oriskany in 1966 and the 1997 USS Forrestal explosives motivated the creation of newer safety programs (FAA, 2013) . A majority of the developments of the system safety were initially steered by the Airforce. These were marked by; first, the creation of the USAF Directorate of Flight Safety Research (DFSR) in 1950, then came the development of other safety units for the navy in 1955 and army in 1957 (FAA, 2013) . The airfare was the leader in aircraft safety during this period, a period in which it sponsored various safety conferences that addressed safety issues in the aircraft technical specializes.
Most of the system safety developments were initiated in the 1960s. The earliest of these was the system safety formal program plan (SSPP), which was created by the Boeing company in 1960 (FAA, 2013) . It was the first formal active program in ensuring aircraft safety but was followed quickly by the military specifications of the safety design requirements MILS-S-23069 in 1961 (FAA, 2013) . The latter safety requirements report was developed by the Bureau of Naval Weapons. In 1963, MIL-S-38130 was established (FAA, 2013) . USAF developed this system safety to expand the scope of aviation safety to cover the aeronautical, missile, space, and other electronic systems ( FAA, 2013) . There was an increasing application of system safety, and this led to the evolution of many safety practices under the MIL-S-38130 system safety (FAA, 2013) . The MIL-S-38130 went several revisions toward the close of the 1960s until a complete view to safety came about in 1969 (FAA, 2013) . The now expanded scope of the MIL-S-38130 system safety required a re-work on the safety requirements. The basic version of MIL-S-23069 was thus evolved to include concepts of hazard probability and precise estimates of the frequency of occurrence of accidents. This period also saw the development and subsequent evolution of the Fault Tree Analysis (FTA). FTA was conceived by Boeing in 1961 as a safe launch control system design, and through more research, it evolved to become a methodology for accomplishing the objective of safe launching (FAA, 2013) . While FTA began as a missile launch safety program, it soon gained interest from the commercial aircraft division and was commonly applied in the design of commercial aircraft.
The continued perfections in the system safety saw a gradual change from the initially fragile reactive system to the stable proactive system witnessed in the present-day aviation community. The system safety in the commercial flights was gradually replaced by a new management-based concept of safety. From 1970 through to the mid-1990s, the progress in the new model of safety management was driven by the changes in technology (FAA, 2013) . During this period, the focus was shifted from design alone to include a broader scope of human error, which required business-like management approaches. The focus to alleviate human error through intense training and procedural regulations would see a reduction in the safety breakdowns caused by unsatisfactory human performances. Basing on the lessons learned from other industries as well as those from incident investigations, the industry was able to develop a new approach toward managing safety. The new approach becomes evident from the mid-1990s, and it proactively utilized and routinely analyzed collected safety data to mitigate both human errors and system failures that were the major contributors to aircraft accidents and incidents (FAA, 2019) . The new approach to safety management was an amalgamation of both engineering and business-oriented approach to safety, which meant that the aviation safety management system had to borrow from other quality management systems (QMS).
The Influence Quality Management System (QMS) on the SMS. A majority of the modern aspects of safety in the aviation SMS can also be traced to alternative systems of management such as the environmental management systems (14 000 series) and the quality management systems (9000 series) (FAA, 2019) . The numerous overlaps between the current structure of the aviation SMS and the traditional QMS are evidence enough that SMS has its roots on the QMS. In particular, both the SMS and the QMS are structured, documented, and process-oriented in their approach towards realizing their specific goals.
SMS borrows from QMS in the use of a systematic structure for approaching its primary concerns. A systematic structure references the creation of a documentable framework that will enable learning within an organization or an entity. This approach to management adds value to the management system considering that an organization does not suffer in times of employee turnover. Additional employees or the new recruits will just step into the system and learn their way through the documented framework until they gain proficiency.
`The documentation aspect of SMS is also similar to that in QMS, where both systems demonstrate a documentable commitment to an organizations’ integrity. The only distinction comes in their primary concerns, where while QMS is primarily business-oriented, SMS programs are entirely safety oriented (FAA, 2019) . More specifically, QMS covers the business and organization's business operation in its interlay, which also includes the safety measures for the particular business. SMS narrow focus on security alone makes it seem like a small part of the larger picture of QMS.
The Turning Point. The aviation authorities had exhibited the intention to incorporate safety oversight into the then QMS programs in around 1980 (FAA, 2019) . In 1995, an aviation safety summit that included 950 representatives of airlines, unions, regulators, and other aviation organizational domains was called to discuss the concept of SMS as an independent entity (FAA, 2019) . This meeting became the turning point for aviation SMS to branch and became its own entity. It was the initial international "proactive safety" meeting that had three primary goals: One, the delegates identified a total of 540 aviation issues to be resolved by the safety approaches. Two, the Federal Aviation Authority created a new office for System Safety, and three, a Federal Aviation Authority issued a safety action plan with a total of 173 initiatives to be accomplished in the subsequent years. Unlike the past conferences and reports whose standards were based on past accidents, the plans and initiatives from the 1995 summit were the initial formally documented tools for proactive safety management because they were predictive and sought to identify risks before they actually materialized (FAA, 2019) .
Some of the major components of the proactive safety management system as identified by FAA (2019) included: i) the creation of unambiguous safety policies ensuring for senior management and commitment to safety, ii) using state-of-art risk assessment methods to identify hazards ad asses risk, iii) creation of safety reporting systems for data collection, analysis, and sharing of operational safety, iv) establishment of highly competent investigation criteria for identifying systemic safety deficiencies, v) safety oversight and monitoring aimed at assessing the safety performance and eliminating problems, vi) holistic training for aviation personnel, vii) creation of channels for sharing safety information and best practices among aviation operators and service provider, and viii) developing a corporate culture to foster competent safety practices in a non-punitive aviation environment. None of these components were intended to meet the expectations for improved aviation safety on their own. The summit, therefore, advocated for the integrated use of these components to increase the resistance of the system to unsafe acts of aviation. The consistent and integrated use of these proactive components and their derivatives became what is commonly termed as the Safety Management System (SMS)
The Evolution of the Safety Management System
Changing Perspectives on Aviation Safety. To understand the evolution of SMS, it is first appropriate to review the historical progress in aviation safety. The earliest phase of aviation safety was predominantly technical. This era lasted from the onset of the 20th century up until the late 1960s (ICAO, 2018). Safety issues were mainly attributed to technical failures. The focus of safety management was on the investigation and improvement of technological features. These efforts led to a decline in the frequency of accidents, leading to the gradual inclusion of regulatory compliances
The technical era was succeeded by the human factors era, which lasted from the 1970s to the mid-1990s (ICAO, 2018). Due to the improvements in technology, the focus was broadly ended to include human factors among the possible contributors to accidents, the main speculation's being on the uncoordinated man-machine interactions. Human favors were reportedly recurrent while the technological failures became negligible. Human factors were mainly considered in individual contexts rather than in the broad organizational context.
The end of the 1990s ushered in the organizational era, which extends to the present day. In this era, safety is viewed from a systematic perceptive, which combines factors from both the technical, human, and environmental context within which the airlines operate (ICAO, 2018). Organizational culture and policies are seen as safety risk controls. The organizational era is characterized by the functionality of safety management systems (SMS). SMS uses both reactive and proactive measures to monitor aviation safety.
Changes in the Safety Management System. The increasing recognition of the vital role played by the safety management system has resulted in progressive development and implementation of SMS by most aviation service provider organizations, including airlines, aircraft operators, helicopter operators, airport operators, air maintenance organizations (AMOs), and air navigator service providers.
A milestone feature that characterized the evolution of SMS was the development of the four pillars of safety management. The four pillars were initially developed by Canada's former Director-General of System Safety for Transport in the year 2000 (ICAO, 2018). These four pillars include Safety Policy and Objectives, Safety Risk Management, Safety Assurance, and Safety Promotion. The pillars were expanded by the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) international, which sought to develop its SMS around the four pillars in the year 2000 (ICAO, 2018). Following the success of ALPA’s work, authorities such as the Federal Aviation Authority and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) decided to adopt the four pillars into its SMS.
The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) adopted the four pillars of safety to aid in transforming the SMS to cover all sectors in the aviation landscape. The adoption of the four pillars would enable ICAO to implement the SMS for all commercial aviation service providers. Although the central elements in the modern aviation SMS stretch back much further in history, as a cohesive whole, the SMS was formally solidified in the United States and other globally in the year 2006 (ICAO, 2018). The solidification was done by adopting the four pillars, whose success had been noted from the work of ALPA international. After the 2006 adoption of the four pillars, the stage was set for the evolution of SMS to the modern version of aviation SMS seen in the world. ICAO stepped up its push for all members to start to develop and implement SMS by paying attention to the four pillars for greater safety.
The future of SMS
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. The current SMS accomplishes two main objectives. One, it gives the platform for the reporting of hazards, whereby aviation stakeholders observe and report any objects or incidents that are likely to cause harm, cause the death of aviation personnel, or damage to aviation equipment and property. Two, for every identified hazard, SMS ensures that the hazard is taken through a risk assessment and gets categorized accordingly. The aviation environment is also witnessing a robust growth in technology that blends volumes of safety information to ensure that essential safety issues do not escape the attention of the safety management team (AGCS, 2014). This advancement in technology presents a huge potential for the automation of aviation safety.
Particularly, machine learning and artificial intelligence are seen as two areas that can be exploited to bridge the gap in the current over-reliance on human surveillance for hazard identification and risk assessment. Adopting machine learning and artificial intelligence in the identifications of hazards and the assessment of risks can provide greater guidance to safety in new and better ways. The application of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) will help aviation safety analysts to recognize patterns in operational data and connect data sets from different viewpoints to enhance aviation safety. Through the development of machine learning frameworks, the industry will be better poised to recognize new risk identification procedures for the potential new or emerging safety issues. The versatility of machine learning and AI means that the efforts to identify risks will cut across surface, terminal, and en route aircraft operations to make the entire scope of aviation safer (ICAO, 2019). Machine learning will also offer advance data storage to act as hazard repositories for quick referencing in case of the recurrence of existent safety risks.
Artificial Intelligence and Data Detection. Artificial intelligence holds the promise of de-identifying, protecting, and archiving huge amounts of aviation safety data in various types and formats. A challenge could lie in the vast amounts of disparate data. Such quality of data causes difficulty in the detection of unknown vulnerabilities and anomalies. However, with proper integration of AI, the future systems would be capable of classifying safety reports automatically into the already known safety categories by identifying the aspects of similarity though numerical analysis (ICAO, 2019). One area that could potentially benefit from the application of artificial intelligence is pilot safety reports. It is very difficult to determine the quality of hundreds of flights by manually examining hundreds of thousands of pilot reports. However, the use of artificial intelligence would enable text classification techniques to learn the word and phrase patterns of pilot safety reports. Text classification techniques would enable safety managers to monitor previously recognized trends of safety factors and human factors. The safety analysts are fully aware of what to look for, and will, therefore, sieve through vast amounts of text report to identify insights that will guide them in understanding the likely contributors to safety issues (ICAO, 2019). For cases where the safety analysts do not recognize what they are looking for, AI can make comparisons of closely related issues to arrive at a potential safety hazard proactively.
Air-Safety Trends through Proactive Identification. Artificial intelligence and machine learning hold the potential of examining human factors such as fatigue, distraction, and workload and understanding their implication to the flight safety standards (ICAO, 2019).
The analysis of human factors utilizes deep-learning techniques to make sense of basic human speech. Automatic speech recognition techniques are capable of converting air traffic control speech patterns to text. The texts can then be processed for real-time safety operation safety evaluation, post -operations analysis, and air traffic control training. These capabilities could enable the safety teams to detect potentially dangerous human operations much sooner than the current systems are capable of.
Areas of Change. Flight deck safety automation brought about by artificial intelligence would be a major leap in aviation safety. But the automation alone is not sufficient to cover the safety needs of the future. Instead, there are areas that will require improvements. These include the next generation of aviators and the factor of economic prosperity.
The advances in flight-deck automation will require a boost of hands-on expertise from pilots. Due to the global demand for pilots for intelligent aircraft will cause a mass transition of trainees from simple plane designs to complex systems. Due to this reason, the pilot certification program in the current aviation community must be revised. The trainers must be put on newer curricula that will equip them with sufficient skills for commanding complex and advanced aircraft systems. This will make up for the lack of experience in recovery from the current normal flight techniques to the anticipated complex flight situations. Addressing the issue of pilot transition from a generation of simple to an era of highly sophisticated flights is a vital proactive safety measure for the future of SMS.
The performance of the economy is a dominant factor defining the safety levels realized by any SMS. The current regional differences in accident rates can be attributed to the disparities in the economic performances across geographical zones. As a consequence, there is a need to go beyond addressing the common human factors for safety and direct part of the focus on the economic environments of the airlines. It would require the airlines to cooperate with their respective governments to support economic preferences that will enhance safety developments such as advanced weather forecasts, runway safety, and other critical infrastructures that impact on aviation safety.
Several authors have attempted to define SMS, but the definition given by ICAO is arguably the simplest way to understand the ideal meaning of SMS. ICAO defined aviation SMS as the systematic approach towards ensuring the safety of the aviation community, including the procedures, policies, responsibilities, and organizational structure put in place to oversee the entire process of managing the safety. The primary role of SMS is to the continual identification of safety hazards and execution of tasks that will ensure that these safety risks have been managed properly. As aforementioned, the safety of airlines is commonly measured by accident rates. However, it is worth noting that the absence of past events does not necessarily indicate that accidents will not occur in the future. Nor does such absence point to an absolute absence of risk. As a consequence, ICAO underscores that this measurement causes a deficiency of not sufficiently reflecting latent events. Latent hazards are those who may not be readily apparent, but the longer they remain hidden below the surface of normal airline operations, the higher the chances that they will inflict serious damage to the system. The ignorance surrounding latent hazards meant that the aviation safety system remained characteristically reactive.
There are several drivers for the remarkable change from proactive to reactive safety management systems. The long-term global airline safety improvements have been attributed to several factors, including the shifting cultures among the users of air transports and the trends in technology. The improved air traffic control technology for better collision avoidance, coupled with the notably higher standards of aviation training, is seen as the most impactful drivers of the change. Currently, pilots have ready access to more accurate and up-to-date data on weather. The aircraft are also inspected more efficiently, utilizing improved technologies. It means that challenges are identified easily and dealt with earlier enough before they culminate in significant damages. Pilots also undergo recurrent training, indicating that they are better positioned to refresh their pool of knowledge regarding aviation safety more often enough to avoid unnecessary pilot errors. The SMS has undergone significant changes over the last century, and ahead lies a more promising future to airline safety management.
References
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Federal Aviation Administration. (2013, March 19). System Safety Handbook . Federal Aviation Administration. https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/aviation/risk_management/ss_handbook/
Federal Aviation Administration. (2019, June 21). Safety Management System (SMS) . Federal Aviation Administration. https://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/sms/
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International Civil Aviation Organization. (2019). Artificial intelligence and Digitization in Aviation . https://www.icao.int/Meetings/a40/Documents/WP/wp_268_en.pdf
