145.A.202 Internal safety reporting scheme

(a)Each internal safety reporting scheme should ensure confidentiality and enable and encourage free and frank reporting of any potentially safety-related occurrence, including incidents such as errors or near misses, safety issues and identified hazards. This will be facilitated by the establishment of a just culture.

(b)The internal safety reporting scheme should contain the following elements:

(1)clearly identified aims and objectives with demonstrable corporate commitment;

(2)a just culture policy as part of the safety policy, and related just culture implementation procedures;

(3)a process to:

(i)identify those reports which require investigation; and

(ii)when so identified, investigate all the causal and contributing factors, including technical, organisational, managerial, or human factors issues, and any other contributing factors related to the occurrence, incident, error or near miss that was identified;

(iii)if adapted to the size and complexity of the organisation, analyse the collective data showing the trends and frequencies of the contributing factors;

(4)appropriate corrective actions based on the findings of investigations;

(5)initial and recurrent training for staff involved in internal investigations;

(6)where relevant, the organisation should cooperate with the owner, operator or CAMO on occurrence investigations by exchanging relevant information to improve aviation safety.

(c)The internal safety reporting scheme should:

(1)ensure the confidentiality of the reporter;

(2)be closed loop, to ensure that actions are taken internally to address safety issues and hazards; and

(3)feed into the recurrent training as defined in AMC3 145.A.30(e) whilst maintaining the appropriate confidentiality.

(d)Feedback should be given to staff both on an individual and a more general basis to ensure their continued support of the safety reporting scheme.

GENERAL

(a)The overall purpose of the internal safety reporting scheme is to collect information reported by the organisation personnel and use this reported information to improve the level of compliance and safety performance of the organisation. The purpose is not to attribute blame.

(b)The objectives of the scheme are to:

(1)enable an assessment to be made of the safety implications of each relevant incident (errors, near miss), safety issue and hazard reported, including previous similar issues, so that any necessary action can be initiated; and

(2)ensure that knowledge of relevant incidents, safety issues and hazards is shared so that other persons and organisations may learn from them.

(c)The scheme is an essential part of the overall monitoring function and should be complementary to the normal day-to-day procedures and ‘control’ systems; it is not intended to duplicate or supersede any of them. The scheme is a tool to identify those instances in which routine procedures have failed or may fail.

(d)All reports should be retained, as the significance of such reports may only become obvious at a later date.

(e)The collection and analysis of timely, appropriate and accurate data will allow the organisation to react to the information that it receives, and to take the necessary action.