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FOREWORD

This fourth edition of the Safety Management Manual (SMM) supersedes the third edition, published in May 2013, in its entirety. The development of this edition was initiated after the adoption of Amendment 1 to Annex 19 to address the changes introduced by the amendment and to reflect the knowledge and experience gained since the last revision.

To address the needs of the diverse aviation community implementing safety management and a recommendation stemming from the second High-level Safety Conference held in 2015, the Safety Management Implementation (SMI) website (www.icao.int/SMI) has been developed to complement the SMM and serves as a repository for the sharing of best practices. Practical examples, tools, and supporting educational material will be collected, reviewed and posted on the website on an ongoing basis.

This edition is intended to support States in implementing effective State safety programmes (SSP). This includes ensuring that service providers implement safety management systems (SMS) in accordance with the provisions of Annex 19. In order to be consistent with Safety management principles, a concerted effort has been made to focus on the intended outcome of each Standard and Recommended Practice (SARP), purposely avoiding being overly prescriptive. Emphasis has been placed on the importance of each organization tailoring the implementation of safety management to fit their specific environment.

Note 1.- In this manual, the term "organization" is used to refer to both States and service providers.

Note 2.- In this manual, the term "service provider" is used to refer to an aviation industry organization implementing SMS whether on a mandatory or voluntary basis, unlike Annex 19 which uses the term to refer to a very specific list of organizations found in Chapter 3, which excludes international general aviation operators.

The fourth edition is divided into nine chapters which progressively build the reader's understanding of safety management. These chapters can be grouped under the following three themes:

1) Safety management fundamentals - Chapters 1 to 3 build the reader's understanding of the fundamental principles underpinning safety management.

2) Developing safety intelligence - Chapters 4 to 7 build on the fundamentals. These chapters comprise four interrelated topics concerned with leveraging safety data and safety information to develop actionable insights which can be used by an organization's leadership to make data-driven decisions, including those related to the most effective and efficient use of resources.

3) Safety management implementation - Chapters 8 and 9 explain how to apply the concepts from the preceding chapters to institutionalize safety management at the State and service provider level.

Guidance to support sector-specific safety management SARPs found outside of Annex 19 (e.g. flight data analysis programmes) is not addressed in this manual. The Manual of Aircraft Accident and Incident Investigation (Doc 9756) contains guidance on the conduct of independent State accident and incident investigations in accordance with Annex 13 - Aircraft Accident and Incident Investigation.

ICAO gratefully acknowledges the contributions of the Safety Management Panel (SMP) and the Safety Information Protection Implementation Group (SIP IG) as well as other expert groups and individual experts who provided support, advice and input for this manual. The content was developed over a period of two years and was thereafter submitted for an extensive peer review to collect and take into account comments from the expert community, taking into consideration that the manual is expected to be the overarching guidance for safety management for a wide community.