Developement of Safety Performance Indicators for Lufthansa Cargo as part of an airline SMS implementation

The topic of safety has a particularly high priority in air traffic. As of 1 January 2012, the legislator requires all airlines to introduce a Safety Management System (SMS). It is intended to make corporate safety measurable in order to identify weak points that could induce a partial or overall hazard to aviation safety. In this context, Lufthansa Cargo AG (LCAG) commissioned the Chair of Air Transport Technology and Logistics to complete its Safety Management System, which has already been partially implemented.

According to the ICAO SMS Framework and ESARR 3 SMS Framework, a safety management system essentially consists of four sub-areas:

• Safety Policy,
• Safety Assurance,
• Safety Risk Management, and
• Safety promotion.

Saftey Policy is the introduction of a safety culture in the company by the management, which brings economic targets and desirable safety in line. Saftey Assurance includes the definition of so-called Safety Performance Indicators (SPI) to measure the safety performance in the company in order to derive risk control strategies. In the area of safety risk management, the need for action is to be analysed and derived from the risk control strategies. The subarea Safety Promotion aims at the implementation of the defined safety culture in the company.

The tasks assigned to the Chair relate mainly to the areas of Safety Assurance and Safety Risk Management. The aim of the project is to develop performance indicators for safety assessment. The project poses a particular challenge in dealing with the so-called "small numbers", as LCAG, with its fleet of 18 MD-11, is more likely to belong to the category of small airlines and therefore the database available for analysis is small.

The Chair contributes its many years of experience in the field of risk analysis of safety-critical processes as well as experience gained in the context of airport SMS projects.