Sms Works And This Is How...

[mac]

Skidz,

If you read the last line of my post I basically said that if you had all this ,yes basically you have a sms system."SMS as is being bandied about today IS a paper trail and those who promote an defend it usually have a vested interest financialy or derive their living from it.

[Skywork]

As a small operator in Australia I went down this path 10 months ago as SMS which seems to be the buzz word in aviation around the world and will be a requirement here.When I rang a lady who does a lot of these, she recomended to go dowm the ISO standard as for her to write a proper plan for the business was only going to cost $1000.00 more, plus I would have the auditing cost. I went with this and found that if you are any decent type of business you are already doing it and it is just about having your procedures and systems recorded. She was very adament that the system she wrote reflected our bussiness, not a generic system. As a owner and chief pilot my concern was getting the pilots to want change(These were going to be very little, more paperwork which is very minimal)Well I did not have to worry about that as most pilots want to go home at night to see family, The biggest challange is getting companies who you work for to accept the little changes and of course they will still take the shonky operator who will save them a dollar per hour and government departments seem to be the best at that.There safety,procedures and time go as far as there wallet.The paper work has not increased much you just need a place to file it and the cost of running the system would be less than 10k per year. The biggest benefit I see is when tendering we go straight through the system as it is a Certified System and we do not have the pre tender audits so that saves us grief and we probably recoup abit of the 10k it cost to run it.If management follow the system I think it grows a better business but if they are only going to hang the certificates on the wall it is a waste of time and everybody in the company from management to pilots and office staff need to get on the same page. As I said if each individual is responsible for themselves and are already taking care of that and your company has a good work ethic , you are already doing 98% of it and as a pilot you will not see much change as alot of it is behind the scenes.

For interest we done a intergrated plan which has 3 systems tied in together as the standard overlaps them all, ISO 9001-2008(Quality) ISO 14001(Enviromental) NZ/AS 4801(safety) Ag operations both fixed wing and helo,s are also included in the scope of the certificats.

 

Brent