India is one of 52 original signatories to the 1944 Convention on International Civil Aviation, the charter of ICAO. Through its fledgling years, Indian aviation has endeavoured to generally conform with ICAO requirements and, as it consolidates and grows impressively, the annexes to the convention remain important to the Indian aviation establishment. The Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has committed itself to adopt ICAO’s Safety Management System (SMS) for all stakeholders in Indian aviation by January 2009. Considering the implementation of the SMS is expected to be an expensive and laborious exercise, the deadline of January 2009 already appears to be a bit ambitious.

ICAO is pushing for the implementation of safety management systems by all aviation activities across the world as part of its strategic focus on global civil aviation safety. It is aware that many of its member states and some other organisations have been involved in implementing safety management systems in various forms over the years. However, there was a general lack of standardisation and some discrepancies with regard to the key terms and concepts in use by them. ICAO first introduced the requirement for safety management in Annex 11 (Air Traffic Services) and Annex 14 (Aerodromes, Volume I—Aerodrome Design and Operations).

Subsequently, it felt the need for expanding the concept and including matching provisions with other annexes of the Chicago Convention. Starting 2005, ICAO initiated efforts to harmonise these endeavours and to combine all its safety management guidance into a single, comprehensive document called the Safety Management Manual (more familiar to aviation professionals by its numeric identifier ICAO Doc 9859). The manual is a comprehensive, single source documenting how aviation ought to be managed, and sets the stage for the introduction of safety management. In order to reinforce the notion of safety management being a managerial process, the ICAO safety management requirements include provisions for an organisation to establish lines of safety accountability throughout the organisation, as well as at the senior management level.