SRM For Everyone
By Rebekah Waters, FAA Safety Briefing Magazine
I tend to leap before I look. I’ve been this way all my life. I often find myself scrambling to catch my drink before it spills or swerve my grocery cart aside as I turn the corner of an aisle at full speed almost colliding with an unsuspecting shopper. Luckily, I have developed lightning-quick reaction times. Quick reactions certainly come in handy during drone operations, but when it comes to navigating the National Airspace System (NAS), it is always better to be proactive about safety, rather than reactive. Safety risk management (SRM), one of the four components of a safety management system (SMS), helps you anticipate and mitigate risk before there’s a need for quick reactions.
Who Needs SRM?
It is the FAA’s job to identify hazards, assess risk, and evaluate the effectiveness of proposed risk mitigations before making any decision regarding the operation of drones in the NAS. The agency uses an SRM process that analyzes the severity and likelihood of hazards associated with these types of decisions. Large organizations that use drones as a part of their daily business often use an SRM process as part of their SMS to build and support a sound safety culture. But does the individual drone operator or small business that occasionally operates drones need to use SRM? The short answer is yes.
SRM is a great tool to start with and ensure your operations are as safe as possible. SRM can help you identify the risks and hazards you might encounter for every operation you conduct. Rather than trying to problem-solve on the fly, an SRM helps you proactively consider what could go wrong and prepare a solution ahead of time. Having a plan in place not only keeps you and the NAS safer, it also might make your operation more efficient and less stressful.
Developing Your Own SRM
While the FAA’s SRM policy for drones, Order 8040.6A, is 30 pages long, your assessments will most likely be a lot shorter. When developing SRM for your operations, think about how you operate your drone. A good SRM documents the common hazards. These are typically technical issues with a drone, human error, deterioration of external systems, and adverse operating conditions. The SRM should identify the mitigations to lower the risk to an acceptable level. For example, having and adhering to weather limitations is a mitigation to the adverse operating conditions hazard. Performing a preflight check is a mitigation for the technical issues with the drone hazard. In other words, always have a backup plan and backup systems.
What’s the most likely issue(s) you may encounter on this flight? Is it human factors, weather, signal, drone performance, or the sudden appearance of low-flying aircraft from an unexpected direction? Are there heliports nearby where helicopter traffic is to be expected? An ultralight base? If a link fails, do you have a lost link procedure and/or geofence? If the lost link always happens in the same location, make a plan to avoid that location in the future. When there are technical issues or human errors with your operation, stop, investigate, and correct them. Make sure you have a plan for system failures, like a backup display or power source. A good SRM assessment helps you to remember not to test the limits: weather, battery life, crew rest, or your drone’s range. Good operators know how to fly, but great operators know when they shouldn’t.
While the FAA’s UAS SRM policy, Order 8040.6A, is 30 pages long, yours will most likely be a lot shorter.
All drone operators can benefit from SRM, and developing your own is a good way to build safety culture into your daily operations. As an emerging technology, drones have a pretty good safety record. SRM is one way to make sure that doesn’t change! The more we work to proactively assess and mitigate risk, the safer we can keep the NAS.
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Rebekah Waters is an FAA Safety Briefing associate editor. She is a technical writer-editor in the FAA’s Flight Standards Service.
