Safety policy · § 5.25
The accountable executive under FAA Part 5
Part 5 requires a single named individual with final authority over the safety management system. In a small operation that is usually obvious, occasionally awkward, and frequently documented badly.
What the role is
The accountable executive is the person with ultimate responsibility for the SMS. Not the person who runs it day to day — that is typically a safety manager — but the person who can actually commit the organisation.
The defining characteristics are authority, not job title:
- Final authority over operations conducted under your certificate.
- Control of the financial and human resources required to run the SMS.
- Ultimate responsibility for safety performance.
- Authority to stop an operation on safety grounds.
In practice this is the president, owner, general manager or director of operations. In a single-aircraft operation it is very often the same person who flies the aircraft.
Why it must be one person
Because diffuse accountability is no accountability. If a hazard assessment concludes that a route needs a control that costs money, someone has to be able to authorise it. Safety committees are useful; they are not a substitute for a named individual who owns the outcome.
What to document
Three things, and they are frequently incomplete:
- Who. The named individual and their position. Not "the management team".
- When. The date of designation. This matters: it establishes when accountability attached, and it is a field an inspector can ask for directly.
- What they signed. The safety policy carrying their approval, with a version and a date, so you can show which policy was in force at any given point.
All three are first-class fields in this platform's safety profile, and the policy approval trail records the approver, their role and the timestamp against a specific version of the document.
When the accountable executive changes
Ownership changes, people leave. When the accountable executive changes you need a new designation with a new date, and the safety policy should be re-approved under the new signature rather than left carrying a predecessor's name. Leaving a departed executive on your policy is one of the more common findings, and one of the easiest to avoid.
It is also a textbook management-of-change trigger: the departure of the person with final authority over safety is a change to your organisation that warrants a risk assessment in its own right. See the four pillars for where that sits in the rule.
See whether it fits your operation
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