Safety Assurance: Monitoring the Health of Your Safety System

In aviation, hazard identification tells us what could go wrong. Safety assurance tells us whether our defenses are working.

Safety assurance is the third pillar of the Safety Management System (SMS). It verifies that the organization’s safety processes are functioning as intended, not just on paper, but in daily operations.

When done well, it turns safety management from reactive problem-solving into continuous improvement.

The Safety Assurance pillar — verifying that your safety system works as intended.

What Is Safety Assurance?

Safety assurance is the process of monitoring, measuring, and evaluating safety performance to confirm that risks are being managed effectively.

It answers the question:

“Are we as safe as we think we are?”

It involves systematically checking that controls, mitigations, and procedures are performing as expected, and identifying where adjustments are needed.

This isn’t about auditing for compliance. It’s about ensuring that safety actions have real, lasting impact.

Why Safety Assurance Matters

Even with strong procedures and training, safety performance can drift over time. Operations change, people adapt, and risk levels shift.

Safety assurance helps the organization stay aware of these shifts by:

• Tracking safety trends and identifying emerging risks.

• Verifying that corrective actions are effective.

• Ensuring that safety objectives are being met.

• Providing management with a factual basis for safety decisions.

Without safety assurance, we risk managing yesterday’s problems instead of today’s reality.

How It Works — The Core Methods

Safety assurance combines several activities. Each provides a different perspective on whether the system is performing safely:

🔹 Effectiveness of Change Audits: Assess whether implemented changes, risk mitigations, or new procedures are effective and sustainable. These audits close the loop on Management of Change by confirming that controls are working in practice, not just approved on paper.

🔹 Safety Surveys and Interviews: Gather feedback from people at all operational levels to understand how safety processes function day to day and where gaps may exist.

🔹 Data Monitoring and Analysis: Review occurrence data, flight data, and maintenance findings to identify trends, anomalies, or new hazards.

🔹 Safety Performance Monitoring: Use measurable indicators (SPIs) to track ongoing performance, detect early deviations, and verify that safety objectives are met.

Each of these activities contributes to a complete picture of the organization’s safety health.

From Monitoring to Learning

Safety assurance doesn’t close the loop by itself. It tells us whether our safety defenses are working, but the loop only closes when what we’ve learned is shared with the people who make safety happen every day.

That means communicating results, lessons, and improvements clearly across the organization, through safety meetings, newsletters, or training feedback, so everyone understands what was found and why it matters.

That’s how data turns into learning, and learning turns into safer operations.

Looking Ahead

Safety assurance is about trusting but verifying — ensuring that what we say we do is actually what happens in the operation.

In the next article, we’ll take a closer look at Safety Performance Indicators (SPIs), the key tools that turn safety assurance into measurable performance.