SMS Rumors – SMS For Part 145 May Meet Obstacles
December 9, 2022 Leave a comment
The aviation industry has anxiously awaited the FAA’s Safety Management Systems (SMS) rulemaking. The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) had been scheduled for September, 2022, and was then delayed until December of this year. It appears that the proposed SMS rule may have hit another snag.
Industry rumors are suggesting that the SMS rule may have been inadequate to meet the requirements reviewed by the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA). This is based in part on an industry critique that was filed with OIRA; the critique accused the rule of offering inadequate options to small businesses.
If these rumors are true, then it is likely that the SMS rule could be cleaved in half – with the manufacturing portion going forward (but only applying to large manufacturers) and the repair station half being held back.
Regulatory historians will recall that in 1999, the FAA proposed to add quality assurance system requirements to repair stations. That rule was scaled back to just a quality manual. The present SMS proposal for repair stations appears to suffer from some of the same issues that impacted the quality assurance systems rule about twenty years ago. The easiest way for the FAA to deal with this would be to simply go forward with the manufacturing SMS rule but remove the repair station SMS requirements until the FAA could rethink the technical evaluation.
This does not mean that SMS won’t apply to repair stations. EASA has already passed an SMS requirement (EU repair stations entered the two-year implementation period a week ago) and there are air carriers who are talking about flowing down their SMS requirements to their maintenance providers. ASA members with repair station certificates will still need to pay careful attention to their SMS obligations. But those same companies may find that they have more options to meet customer SMS requirements, including voluntary SMS programs.
This is a developing story, and we expect to have more news on SMS developments in 2023!
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