Aviation Safety Management Systems · SDVOSB
May 28, 2027 is not the deadline to start. It is the deadline to be finished.
The FAA now requires every Part 135 operator and every 91.147 air tour operator to file a Declaration of Compliance backed by a working Safety Management System. The declaration is a signature on a system. Seneca builds the system.
Sized to your certificate. Run by your people. Ready for the FSDO.
The misread
The declaration is the finish line, not the start
The Declaration of Compliance is not an application or a statement of intent. It is your formal attestation that an SMS is already developed, already implemented, and already producing documentation. Risk assessments performed. Reports received. Findings closed. Training completed, with dates and signatures.
A system built in April 2027 has none of that history. A system started now walks into the declaration with close to a year of receipts. Same deadline, very different conversations with your FSDO.
After the DCA midair, Congress told the FAA to scrutinize SMS effectiveness. Expect declarations to be examined, not filed.
Services
Three ways in, depending on where you stand
01 · SMS Readiness Review · $3,500
A gap analysis of your operation against every Part 5 requirement. You get written findings, a priority roadmap, and an honest answer to the only question that matters: what stands between you and a declaration you can defend.
02 · SMS Build & Implementation
The full system, built with your people rather than around them. Safety policy, hazard register, risk process, a reporting channel your line pilots will actually use, training, and your first review cycle running. Priced by certificate size and complexity, not by page count.
03 · Pre-Declaration Review · $6,500
Built your SMS in house? An independent audit before you sign. We test the system the way an inspector would: evidence first, manual second. You either sign with confidence or fix the gaps while there is still time.
After the declaration: ongoing SMS administration retainers keep the system alive, the register current, and the evidence accumulating.
Who this is for
Small and mid-size certificates, on purpose
Charter and commuter operators. Air tour operators holding a 91.147 LOA. Air medical programs. The certificates where the chief pilot is also the safety officer and nobody has forty hours to write a manual.
The most common failure over the next two years will not be operators doing too little. It will be operators buying too much: airline-grade manuals nobody runs, producing no evidence, which is the binder problem at five times the price.
Part 5 was written to scale. We build to the size of your operation, because a system your people actually run is the only kind that passes.
Why Seneca
Written by someone who has turned the wrenches and run the reviews
Most SMS consultants come from one side of the house. Either they know airplanes and learned management systems from a slide deck, or they know management systems and have never signed off a logbook.
Seneca is led by an FAA A&P with an Army aviation background who has spent a career as an HSSE director running exactly the systems Part 5 describes: hazard registers, risk assessment, management review, audit response. The SMS you get reads like your operation because it is built from your operation.
Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned. Based in the Valley, serving operators across the Southwest and beyond.
What we will not tell you
A template manual does not make you compliant, and neither does anything we sell, by itself. Part 5 compliance is a functioning system with evidence behind it, and the evidence can only come from your operation actually running it.
What we do is build the system so it can be run, train your people to run it, and verify it produces what an inspector will ask for. Anyone promising compliance in a binder is selling you the exact thing the FAA has told its inspectors to look through.
Find out where you stand
A thirty-minute status conversation, no charge. You describe the operation, we walk the Part 5 requirements together, and you leave knowing your actual distance to the declaration. If you are further along than you thought, the call is short and costs nothing.
Book a status callOr reach Joey directly: 602-579-8903 · joey@senecasafetypartners.com