We saw the enterprise-level data management nightmares that are plaguing most airports around the world as they comply with ICAO's mandate. (see ICAO Compliance Problem link) There are many competent, highly skilled safety managers working in these positions; however, they are not SMS data management professionals. This causes systemic troubles in the entire "national airport SMS organism."

Regional Challenges Continue From Enterprise Level...

Any attempt to get accurate, current reports from airports' SMS systems at the national level leads to suspicious and immediately outdated results. Coordinating data retrieval and data aggregation processes costs exorbitant amounts of money EACH time national or regional reports are required.

How can one perform a valid trend analysis on suspect and outdated data? Reports at the national and regional level are incredibly expensive to collate and impossible to create with any degree of accuracy. Months or a couple years may be required to compile reports identifying trends. By this time, new trends may be developing.

The following image shows the state of most regional and national airport systems.

Aggregating timely and accurate SMS reports at the regional or national level is practically impossible when airports are creating their own disparate systems. Furthermore, when regional airports are not "connected" to the satellite airports, data collection and report generation becomes incredibly costly and time consuming. Data needs to aggregated at lower levels in a consistent manner and stored in a centralized data source to be most effective.