Introducing the Air Safety Management System Tool (ASMAT)
A new evaluation tool to help with Self-Assessment of Air Safety Management.
F-35B Lightning Jet pilots operate from HMS Queen Elizabeth. MOD Crown Copyright.
What is the Air Safety Management Assessment Tool (ASMAT)?
The ASMAT is the MAA’s new tool to help the Defence Air Environment (DAE) Regulated Community to comply with Air Safety management regulations. It replaces the previous MAA Air Safety Management Performance Matrix (MAPM) as a means to conduct first and second party assurance.
What is the ASMAT for?
Safety management is about preventing accidents, keeping people safe and maintaining operational output. To do this effectively, commanders need to understand the risks involved in aviation activities to understand what could go wrong and the likelihood of such an occurrence. If these are understood, they can be prioritised and importantly commanders can put suitable barriers in place to help prevent incidents from occurring. The barriers can then be monitored to assess and assure their effectiveness. This tool helps people to ask the right questions of their Air Safety Management System (ASMS), so they get relevant answers, and are able to highlight areas of strong performance as well as areas where more focus may be required.
Safety is not about risk avoidance, but risk management.
What is the relevance to the wider aviation community?
Everyone involved in aviation must be engaged from a safety culture perspective. Generating and maintaining an engaged safety culture is heavily influenced by the leadership, but it requires support and commitment throughout the entire organisation. To maintain operational effectiveness, the provision of aviation capability must be supported by an ASMS that encapsulates everything we do day-to-day. This comprises the entirety of all documented and undocumented structures, processes, procedures, tools and methodologies that exist to manage Air Safety. This series of interconnected elements that make up the ASMS is what Aviation Duty Holders (ADH) must establish and maintain to comply with RA 1200. The ASMS is not about safety for the sake of it, nor is it about risk avoidance, but rather it is about conducting operations safely and risk management. The Air Safety Management Assessment Tool provides a self-compiled excel database that allows units to score their ASMS. The use of the tool is optional, while its make up is similar to the Civil Aviation Authorities (CAAs) Self-Evaluation tool (linked to their Safety Management System (SMS) regulation – CAP 795), the ASMAT is structured around the areas covered within the four pillars of an ASMS: Safety Policy and Objectives, Safety Risk Management, Safety Assurance and Safety Promotion.
Two Royal Air Force Typhoon fighter jets. MOD Crown Copyright.
What is the benefit of using the ASMAT?
The ASMAT provides a wide-ranging assessment of the current performance of the ASMS and highlights areas where further development may be needed. This approach can assist organisations in making better informed decisions when allocating resources to the management of Air Safety. The ASMAT should be used to record findings and has a function to produce a graphical representation of the assurance assessment conducted.
An important benefit of the ASMAT is that it is a tangible resource that can help Flight Safety teams and ADHs understand specific areas of strength or weaknesses in compliance to regulation. In keeping with the principle of simplicity, it provides a snapshot of the ASMS and associated scoring chart with the click of a button. By keeping all the ASMS evidence in one place, it makes it simple and efficient to provide self-assessment at both first and second party levels of self-audit.
Merlin coming into land. MOD Crown Copyright.
The ASMAT has been designed to address previous shortcomings in the MAPM
Following discussions with Air Safety Management teams across the DAE, it was found that the majority of individuals in Flight Safety posts found the MAPM difficult to use as it lacked any guidance and was simply a template to record audit findings. The ASMAT address these issues by including:
- a revised question set that has been compiled from a variety of internal and external inputs, helping to provide an overt connection with the Air System Safety Case (where relevant)
- safety culture assessments which were previously excluded
- the addition of enhanced tool use guidance making it easy for anyone to use
- an improved scoring system across a 1 to 8 scale within the standard Present, Suitable, Operating, Effective (PSOE) scale used by the CAA
- a more intuitive and user-friendly interface