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Silver Air collaborates closely with Wyvern to maintain FAA standard
Utilising the specialised services of Wyvern, including aggregation of safety data nationwide, allows Silver Air to maintain clear focus on being a safe and professional flight operation. The team works hard to maintain status.
Wyvern senior VP of operations Andrew Day and Silver Air CEO Jason Middleton.

Californian charter operator Silver Air has met the required FAA standard thanks to a partnership with Wyvern. The newly-enacted FAA Part 5 SMS mandate requires many flight operations to have in place a structured SMS to manage safety risks. Compliance with the mandate is made easier by having a well-established system already in place, along with a valued safety partner to help manage and refine that plan.

The company is an accredited Wyvern Wingman PRO operator, which CEO Jason Middleton says gave the company a head start.

Wyvern came in and presented a road map to compliance,” he explains. “Because we already operated under an established and comprehensive SMS, we were already 95 percent of the way there. It coached us through where we needed to be in six months, nine months and carved out the timeline. I really appreciated that. It worked with us; not for us or against us.”

The result, adds Silver Air director of safety and organisational development Hansford Smith, was largely business as usual. “Our operation was already focused on continuous group improvement long before the mandate went into effect,” he states. “Part 5 really hasn't shaped any significant changes for Silver Air because our SMS already met the spirit and intent of the mandate.”

Achieving Wingman PRO accreditation required Silver Air to demonstrate effectiveness in all areas of SMS, excellence in the addressing of human factors and organisational safety culture, and continuous conformity to international standards, validated through an internal audit programme, all tenets the FAA emphasised in mandating SMS for all Part 135 operators, as well as Part 91.147 air tour operators and certain Part 21 certificate holders.

That said, Middleton stresses that maintaining the safest operation possible requires going beyond rote compliance with regulations. “Maintaining paperwork and ensuring we have 10 years of records for the fuelling service in Waco, Texas doesn't necessarily make you safer,” he emphasises. “It just makes you look busy.”

Rather, Middleton believes the best way for operators like Silver Air to meet the spirit and intent of the Part 5 SMS mandate includes learning from the experiences of others across the industry.

“Our industry works in a vacuum,” he goes on. “Operations don't talk with each other about what we're doing right or, especially, maybe what we need to do better, except when we either have people auditing us or when we're in front of the FAA. It's all kept proprietary to the operator.

“That is a failure of the industry. What Wyvern has done is compile this information at a high level, de-identified, keeping all necessary boundaries in place while sharing trending issues, whether they be taxiway incursions, ground handling incidents, runway excursions, etc.”

Middleton likeness bringing Wyvern on board to manage Silver Air's SMS to utilising a qualified and professional flight planning service on international flights. “We could arrange the permits, overflights and all the other complexities in house, and we'd get it done,” he adds. “But we wouldn't be that great at it.

“I'm a massive fan of bringing in the right people for the right job,” Middleton continues. “Our flight operations team absolutely could have brought together our SMS themselves and it would have complied with all the requirements of Part 5, but it may not have been the absolute best system we could have. There are experts in all these things within all areas of aviation.”

Utilising the specialised services of Wyvern, including aggregation of safety data nationwide, allows Silver Air to maintain clear focus on being a safe and professional flight operation.

“I want to learn not only from our operations, but from others' as well,” he says. “It's a huge win for safety when we all can avoid a problem in the future by understanding what has happened in the past.”

That level of information provides critical, invaluable insights that yield real benefits for operators like Silver Air. While the company also utilises other safety audit providers, “Wyvern is really the core foundation of our safety system,” Middleton concludes. “It is a tremendous asset for us and all operators utilising its services.”

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