The Part One Thirty-Five SMS Mandate, the Two Thousand and Twenty-Four FAA Reauthorization, and What a Safety Management System Actually Requires from Every Charter Operator in America

The 2024 FAA Reauthorization Act, signed in May 2024, requires the FAA to finalize a rule extending Safety Management Systems (SMS) to all Part 135 certificate holders - the charter operators, air taxis, air ambulances, and helicopter tour companies that have operated without this framework while their Part 121 airline counterparts have been required to have it since 2015. The mandate gives the FAA a two-year statutory deadline to publish the final rule. For the tens of thousands of pilots and operators in the on-demand air carrier world, that clock is running.

What Part 135 Actually Covers

Title 14, Part 135 governs on-demand air carrier operations. If you charter a flight, that operator almost certainly holds Part 135 authority. The sector spans an enormous range: a solo operator flying a Cessna 208 on backcountry supply routes, helicopter tour companies, air ambulance services, and mid-size charter fleets running jets into mountain airports at night.

This is not the airline world. It has historically operated under a safety framework built around two things: regulatory compliance and reactive investigation. If the FAA audits you and you meet the standard, you pass. If something goes wrong, the NTSB investigates, issues findings, and the operator addresses them. That is the loop.

What has been missing is the proactive layer.

Why Part 135 Was Left Out - and Why That’s Changing

The FAA’s original reasoning for excluding Part 135 from earlier SMS mandates was grounded in scale. A major airline has hundreds or thousands of employees, a dedicated safety department, and the institutional infrastructure to build a system of that complexity. A two-aircraft air taxi operating in rural Alaska does not.

That argument had merit - and limits. The data has shown for years that the per-flight-hour fatal accident rate in Part 135 operations is significantly higher than in Part 121. Not dramatically, not every year, but consistently. The absence of mandatory safety management processes has been part of the explanation cited by congressional investigators, safety advocates, and the NTSB.

The FAA was not entirely idle before the reauthorization. The agency published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) in 2019, generating extensive industry comment. The debate was not about whether SMS worked - it was about how to build compliance frameworks that small operators could actually implement. That question remained unresolved until Congress forced the issue.

The Four Components of an SMS Framework

The FAA’s SMS model is built around four components. Each one has to support the others - a structure with a missing pillar doesn’t stand.

Safety Policy is the foundation: leadership and accountability. The certificate holder must establish a documented safety policy that defines its commitment, identifies accountable executives, and gives the safety function real authority - including budget and access to decision-makers. Where safety officers exist in name only, safety management becomes a compliance exercise.

Safety Risk Management is the analytical engine. Operators must identify hazards systematically, assess the risk those hazards create, and document what mitigations are in place. Consider an operator flying regularly into an airport with a known terrain obstruction on the visual approach that isn’t captured in instrument plate notes. If that hazard lives only in the verbal handoff between captains, it dies when that knowledge walks out the door. SMS requires the hazard to be formally identified, its risk assessed, and mitigations built into training and briefing structures.

Safety Assurance is how the system monitors itself. Are the mitigations working? This component requires continuous monitoring of operations, internal audit processes, and ongoing analysis of safety data - including precursor events: the approach that got low before correction, the GPWS activation, the fatigue-risk flag someone overrode. These events carry information before they become an accident chain.

Safety Promotion is training, communication, and culture. This is where SMS either lives or dies in an organization. Perfect documentation filed in a drawer accomplishes nothing. Safety promotion requires that crews report hazards and near-misses because they trust the information will be used for improvement rather than discipline - and that managers respond with analysis rather than blame.

Why Reporting Culture Is the Hardest Part to Build

When safety reporters face punitive responses, reporting stops. When reporting stops, the data stops. When the data stops, the system runs blind - and doesn’t know it.

Aviation has built a parallel structure to guard against this at the national level. The Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS), administered by NASA under a memorandum of agreement with the FAA, allows pilots, controllers, and mechanics to file confidential reports carrying a degree of immunity from FAA enforcement action. Tens of thousands of ASRS reports are filed every year, and that data has driven safety improvements across the entire system.

SMS’s safety promotion requirement is designed to replicate that culture at the organizational level - not just for reports that go to NASA, but for internal reporting that lets an operator see its own safety picture clearly.

How the Rule Will Account for Small Operators

The expected final rule will incorporate proportional implementation. A one-aircraft resort tour operation has different hazard exposure than a twelve-aircraft charter company flying into challenging terrain airports at night. The SMS each builds should be proportional to that difference.

ICAO developed guidance specifically for small aviation organizations, recognizing that enterprise-scale SMS documentation produced by airlines would be unusable for a small certificate holder. Organizations including the National Business Aviation Association (NBAA) and the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPA) have published implementation resources that translate the framework into practical tools for operators without a dedicated safety department.

The FAA has signaled the final rule will include tiered compliance timelines - larger, more complex operations implementing sooner, with extended compliance periods of potentially several years for single-aircraft and lower-complexity operators. What will not be acceptable is a nominal compliance document that doesn’t reflect actual operations. The FAA’s principal operations inspectors will be evaluating whether the SMS is functional: whether data is being collected, reports reviewed, and culture real. That is a harder audit than checking whether the document exists.

Why Congress Set a Deadline Rather Than Waiting

The FAA rulemaking process is designed for deliberateness. An NPRM, public comment period, comment analysis, rule drafting, interagency review, and Federal Register publication - even without controversy, this takes years. With significant industry pushback on scope and cost, it can take considerably longer.

The 2024 FAA Reauthorization Act’s two-year statutory deadline is not a recommendation. Failure to meet it carries consequences for the agency’s relationship with its authorizing committees on Capitol Hill. That political pressure operates differently than years of NPRM comments.

Notably, the reauthorization did not write SMS requirements directly into statute, as some safety advocates had pushed for. It directed the FAA to finalize a rule, preserving the agency’s technical standard-setting authority. The rule itself will specify what documentation is required, what oversight protocols apply, and what compliance looks like for different operator categories.

What This Means for Operators and Pilots Right Now

For Part 135 operators without an existing SMS program, the time to begin building the foundation is now - not because the final rule is published, but because culture change is the long-lead item. Documentation can be generated in weeks. A genuine safety culture cannot. It requires time, consistent leadership behavior, and reinforcement that people can observe and trust.

Operators already practicing proactive safety reporting, running internal audits, and analyzing their own operational data will not be starting from scratch when compliance is required. Operators who wait for the final rule to build a file will be building something that looks like safety from the outside and doesn’t work from the inside.

Certificated pilots flying Part 135 whose companies lack formal safety reporting mechanisms have standing to raise that with their chief pilot. Passengers who charter flights regularly can ask operators whether they have an SMS program and what their safety reporting process looks like. The good operators will have an answer.

Key Takeaways

• The 2024 FAA Reauthorization Act mandates the FAA finalize an SMS rule for Part 135 operators within two years of the act’s May 2024 signing.
• Part 121 airlines have operated under mandatory SMS since 2015; the persistent gap in per-flight-hour fatal accident rates between Part 121 and Part 135 is a primary driver of this mandate.
• An SMS is not a checklist or audit form - it is a living system built on four pillars: safety policy, safety risk management, safety assurance, and safety promotion.
• The final rule is expected to include tiered compliance timelines scaled to operator size and complexity, with proportional implementation guidance for small operators.
• The documentation is the skeleton. The reporting culture - where crews trust that hazard information leads to improvement rather than discipline - is what makes it function.