ABSTRACT
The objective of this work was to investigate how the safety management system was adopted in aviation in the mid-2010s with the promise to be a step change in the management of safety and a way to reduce the occurrences of accidents. This question was all the more sensible to me that I had had the opportunity to see the SMS implemented in several aviation organizations and hear feedback from practitioners, but I wanted to have a more scientific approach to it. Building on an in-depth analysis of the SMS in aviation and of the genesis of SMSs, the author suggests several ways forward to enhance safety that reaches beyond the current limitations of the SMS, from a limited evolution to a more revolutionary one challenging the very fact to focus on safety to address it.
This concluding chapter starts with an overview of the investigation work presented in this book. The second part comes back to the proposals derived from these insights to enhance safety management. The third part includes a discussion on the interest in conducting a multidisciplinary research. In the light of these elements, the fourth part provides a synthetic response to the initial question of the SMS as a step change in aviation safety.
