While safety management systems (SMS) are powerful tools that are now seeing widespread adoption throughout the aviation industry, if not fully utilized and embraced from the top to bottom of an organization, and without proper reporting, any “near-misses” can go unchecked until disaster strikes. A U.S. Navy aircraft mechanic, who was seriously injured in a maintenance accident, went on a crusade to find out how the root-cause of such a situation, which previously harmed four others, had slipped through the cracks in the Navy's SMS.

Topics the episode will cover:

• Safety Management Systems
• Communication breakdowns
• Blameless culture
• The value of incident reporting