A critical review of African aviation safety management system GAP analysis

Abstract

ICAO recommends that every aviation service provider implement an SMS within the appropriate framework and commensurate with the size and the complexity of its products. To comply with the ICAO SARPs and the local regulations, African
aviation authorities had established guides to implement SMS within the aviation organizations under their control. The ICAO and national authorities have also edited different GAP Analysis checklists to analyze the SMS implementation’s maturity.
In this paper, we will compare different tools used as references by aviation authorities in Africa with the ICAO requirements and then identify the strengths,
weaknesses, and breaches to enable us to find a way to align those tools with the international requirements and levels.
In the first step, we analyzed the different SMS GAPs Analyses edited by different national regulators. Then we compared them with the ICAO Gap analysis checklist and the ICAO SMS framework. We identified the lack and the surplus of each questionnaire. This work will serve as a basis to create a tool that eliminates the lacks, leaves the value-added, and respects all the ICAO requirements, recommended practices, and specific national requests.