SOAR+® SMS

About SOAR+® Next Generation SMS

Principal questions driving the creation of SOAR+®

screen 5 IASA auditor form caracceptance ver3

and SOAR AAP were, “Having identified non-conformity (findings) from any number of audit formularies, what is the best a means to monitor the implementation of complete and permanent corrective actions while ensuring that the ROSI process exemplifies essential SMS attributes such as “Root Cause Analyses,” and “Safety Risk Assessment”?

How best to verify and validate effective implementation, to manage impacts of changes and respond to unintended-consequences?

How do we oversee the refinement of new methods by means of lessons learned throughout the implementation, validation and review processes?

How do we make it visible, viable, sustainable, and sufficiently user-friendly such that review, renewal and finesse of new processes becomes a natural component of fully-functioning safety management system processes: invaluable to those engaged in the art and best-practice of aviation?

SOAR+®

/SOAR AAP Next-Generation SMS Safety of Operations Audit and Resolution of Safety issues utilities seamlessly support these important programs.

The Safety of Operations Audit, Risk Assessment and Financial Viability Analysis (SOAR+) utility can be configured to support any audit protocol including IASA, IOSA (including the the new “Enhanced IOSA” requirements), DOD audits, CASE, and/or NetJets; it can be customized for unique applications; or, it can be adapted to support our own Safety of Operations Assurance, Risk Management, Airmanship Enhancement and Asset Protection services (SOAR AAP).

A few distinguishing attributes about SOAR+:

Each audit question is risk-ranked prior to the audit.
Audit questions can be uniquely created, extracted from other audits, or combined from several existing audit formularies.

Standard reports depict scored results normalized to 100%. This supports an expedient frame of reference for non-technical personnel, and establishes an empirical means for quantifying return on investment: safety, financial, or otherwise.
The prioritization, root-cause, risk assessment, and corrective actions validation/refinement processes constitute a best-practices ICAO-conforming means to close vital gaps in most SMS and quality assurance programs.
SOAR+ includes mechanisms for verifying the creation and implementation of complete and permanent corrective actions starting with prioritization and root-cause analyses and then ending with process-enhancement subroutines. And, provides a means to assure that operators are not simply solving symptomatic impacts of deeply rooted systemic issues: that they are, in fact, addressing and correcting problems at their core: solving causes, not merely effects.

SOAR AAP is a unique application of flight data monitoring (FDM) technologies providing a mechanism for –
Leadership to routinely confirm compliance with standard operations procedures (SOPs) on the ground and in the air, whenever the aircraft is operating.
Pilots to review and critique their own flights, and Flight instructors to inform pilot training activities in support of airmanship assurance/enhancement programs as they relate to the attributes of individual pilots.
SOAR AAP includes pilot assessment and training subroutines as the foundation for the development of career-spanning training programs and even pay-for-performance salary administration plans.
Effective implementation of SOAR APP could compel underwriters to significantly reduce insurance premiums.

Equally as importantly for air operators and aircraft leasing companies, SOAR AAP can support surveillance to demonstrate compliance with lease obligations potentially saving millions of dollars in litigation expense and extra fees at lease termination.

For example, instead of air operators submitting “Snapshot” periodic engine condition monitoring (ECM) reports, SOAP APP provides lessors and airlines chock-to-block operational data monitoring with reports spanning each and every flight. Internally, airlines have access to a computerized means for mining that data that identifies safety issues ranked as Level 1, Level 2 and Level 3 “Events.” Level 3 Events are evaluated by human flight data analysts who confirm severity by corresponding information captured at the inception of the SOAR AAP ROSI process. Hence, FDM is liberated from the constraints of typical Flight Operations Quality Assurance (FOQA) programs and optimized best-practices by means of just-culture paradigms foundational to leading edge safety management system processes.

Through SOAR AAP, air operators capture empirically-derived flight operations data shortly after the conclusion of each flight which is then used to identify and correct SOP, training and operational problems, as opposed to addressing them only forensically, long after the fact, if ever.

SOAR+ and SOAR AAP works with fixed-wing and helicopter flight operations, AMOs, MROs and flight training centers, indeed, in any environment where quality, safety assurance, and return on investment is an important consideration.

the US Department of Transportation’s (DOT’s) Federal Transit Authority (FTA) implementation of safety management systems (SMS) in US municipal transit and rail operations.  Could also work for airports, shipping, and hospitals it: wherever safety and compliance is linked to performance.

SOAR “AAP” is a flight data monitoring (FDM)-based safety of operations-assurance, risk management, airman-ship assurance and asset protection utility incorporating the identical ROSI process as SOAR+.  Unconstrained by traditional flight operations quality assurance (FOQA) paradigms, SOAR AAP optimizes the use of aircraft flight data recorders, the so-called “Black-Boxes,” before the crash: to optimize operations, training, and to actually prevent accidents by making practical application of information that is traditional used only to conduct forensic inquiry…after the fact.

SOAR+ Attributes –

  • Audit standards can be derived and/or imported into SOAR+ from any source: from ICAO, host country regulations, to internal airline oversight, quality control and quality assurance processes.
  • A gap analysis and corrective actions tool exemplary of highest standards in SMS.
  • Supports SAIs, EPIs, specific regulatory requirements (SRRs), as well DOD and Enhanced-IOSA requirements.
    • Also available as an IOSA-attainment sub-routine providing a sequential guide to air, ground and maintenance operators in achieving and maintaining IATA registration.
  • Standards and findings are risk-ranked in advance of the audits, and after, to guide in prioritizing effective action plans.
  • Reports are normalized to 100% to facilitate effective communications with non-technical stakeholders, and to
    • Establish a basis for quantifying return on investments in safety.
  • Both SOAR+ and SOAR AAP fill significant lapses in virtually all existing SMS computer-based utilities,
    • Can be integrated into existing SMS software.
  • There are Enterprise versions,
    • And versions capable of supporting-
      • Mobile devices,
      • Laptop PCs and
      • “Cloud-based” access.
    • The ROSI process includes prioritization of findings on the basis of safety and/or business, political and economic concerns, supporting unparalleled root cause analysis, safety risk assessment (SRA) and corrective actions implementation, validation, and assurance processes.

•     Indeed, SOAR+/SOAR APP may represent a credible foundation for what can best be described as “Next-generation SMS.”

SOAR+ is deliberately configured to be useful measuring the attainment of standards in virtually any environment. For example, SOAR+ could be a useful means to measure attainment of implementation standards in Ebola prevention and treatment procedures, methods and protocols, to report results in an imminently intuitive