Safety Leadership Charter, Guiding Principle #1: "Lead obligation to safety through words and actions".
Safety Leadership Charter, Guiding Principle #2: "Foster safety awareness among employees, the leadership team, and the board”.
Safety Leadership Charter Guiding Principle #4: "Create the internal capacity to proactively manage safety and collectively achieve organizational safety goals".
Safety Leadership Charter Guiding Principle #5: "Creating an atmosphere of trust, where all employees feel responsible for safety and are encouraged and expected to report safety-related information".
Background
KM Malta Airlines is a relatively new company. It obtained its Air Operator Certificate in late 2023 and became the Maltese National Airline on 1 April 2024. The airline employs around 400 people, operates a young fleet of eight A320-251N aircraft, and connects Malta to 20 airports across 18 key cities in Europe and the Mediterranean, as well as beyond through a network of 11 IOSA-registered codeshare partners.
As a newly established national airline, KM Malta Airlines recognised from the outset that safety culture would need to be one of the cornerstones of the organization – not simply a regulatory requirement, but a defining organizational value.
In March 2026, the Airline successfully completed its renewal IOSA audit, achieving encouraging results in the maturity assessment of its management system. Most performance indicators confirmed a Mature management system and the overall leading Safety Maturity Index reflected performance, driven by several leading indicators.
For KM Malta Airlines, this was the first time that leading indicators featured in its Maturity Assessment Report. As a relatively small organization, the Airline had always been committed to building a strong safety culture and maintaining an effective safety management system. However, given its size and the practical limitations that come with it, achieving leading scores had initially been viewed as a longer-term milestone rather than an immediate expectation.
This outcome reinforced the company's belief that a strong safety culture is not dependent on size or resources alone, but on consistent leadership, meaningful engagement, and a genuine commitment to safety at every level of the organization.
Brief description of the initiative
Like any other culture, a safety culture must be a living thing. In safety management, a top-down approach is essential, and it is widely recognised that a strong Safety Culture forms the foundation of an effective Safety Management System (SMS).
Without it, there is a risk that the SMS becomes a compliance exercise, rather than a living operational system that supports continuous improvement. If safety culture is the basis of a properly functioning SMS, the question then becomes: what enables such culture?
At KM Malta Airlines, the answer lies in meaningful safety leadership and the behaviours that support it. The Airline considers its people to be its greatest asset, who make KM Malta Airlines what it is today. The company firmly believes that its people are the key to a safe and successful airline.
It operates on the premise that employees come to work wanting to do a good job. When employees make a mistake, the airline does not look at human error as a root cause, but rather as an indication that people may need better tools, training, resources, or a better environment.
In KM Malta Airlines Executive Chairman Mr. David Curmi’s words: “This is the essence of what fuels our culture. It is a behaviour, which we have instilled top-down, where we look at occurrences of human error as an opportunity to first and foremost strengthen our systems, processes and procedures, but also to visibly demonstrate our commitment to this belief by walking the talk, thus reinforcing trust in our safety priorities.”
As a relatively small organization, resources often limit KM Malta Airlines to seek practical, simple, and effective solutions. However, when developing a safety culture, small size can be a strength. Recognizing this, the airline used it to its benefit and implemented a number of simple initiatives to that safety is embedded in everything it does:
- Visible leadership: The Safety Manager is the company’s Safety Champion. He is a central figure in the organization, reinforcing its safety culture by being a visible leading advocate, and promoter of its safety values.
- Initial safety training for all staff: All staff, from the most junior to the most senior, receive face-to-face initial - and recurrent - safety training delivered by the Safety Manager or one of the Safety Officers. These sessions go beyond policy and compliance requirements. By discussing safety in simple and practical terms, the airline aims to help employees understand the purpose and value of safety management, and how their individual contribution directly supports a safer operation.
- Tailored safety training that includes real-world examples: Safety training is customised to the audience, where the company uses its own examples from the SMS to raise organizational awareness about incidents and near-misses, and how these were turned into learning opportunities. In doing so, the airline reinforces trust amongst the workforce on how occurrences are viewed – not failures, but opportunities to become better.
- SMS training, safety reporting and communications for external providers: The Airline provides training on its SMS to all external service providers, gives them access to its safety reporting system and visibility of its safety communications. It invites its main providers to its Safety Action Group meetings and hope to get more providers involved over time.
- Commitment to just culture principles: The company strongly protects the principles of just culture within both safety reporting and flight data monitoring programs. Reporter confidentiality is safeguarded, and investigations focus on understanding what happened, and why - never on who to blame.
- Contributing to and learning from the global safety community: KM Malta Airlines considers itself to be part of a Total Safety System, where it can contribute to a safer aviation industry, and where other entities who it interacts with can help the airline become safer. The airline shares de-identified investigation reports with its industry safety partners, as relevant to the occurrence, and takes the opportunity as well to speak in safety forums to share lessons learnt from its own occurrences.
- Safety on meeting agendas, at every level: Safety management is represented throughout the entire organization, in just about any formal meeting which takes place – from the departmental level right up to the Board. This is done to ensure that safety remains a primary focus in everything that the airline does.
- Continuous safety communication and awareness: Apart from a system of Safety Notices issued within operational areas to address issues and promote safety awareness, the airline introduced a Safety, Security & Compliance Newsletter, published once every two months. This Newsletter is sent out to all employees, as a means of maintaining a high level of awareness about safety.
- Regularly assessing and understanding safety culture: The airline runs regular de-identified Safety Culture surveys throughout the organization, including its external providers, and openly shares the results with everyone. It recognises its strengths, but similarly accepts critique and feedback received.
What positive changes did this initiative help bring?
- KM Malta Airlines enjoys a healthy safety reporting system. It receives a good amount of safety reports from all areas in the organization, including reports from its external service providers.
- People feel comfortable reporting their own mistakes. They understand the protections of the system, and that if they make a mistake, they will be treated fairly.
- For the organization, this means that it has a good understanding of what is going on, and that it can effectively identify those latent conditions which will over time become normalized and could one day lead to undesirable outcomes.
- The airline sees a noticeable improvement on several important safety performance indicators. Several SPIs that historically showed limited improvement have gradually evolved into lower-risk areas.
- The company sees improvement in the output of its SMS, namely, its top-5 risks – as identified by the system – are now more aligned with reality.
- There is a strong sense of respect within the organization towards Safety, airline’s SMS and its importance.
Main challenges and lessons-learned
- One of the key lessons for KM Malta Airlines is that Safety Culture must be continuously lived and reinforced throughout the organization. It requires a physical presence beyond that of a Safety Policy that is affixed to a wall or shared through an intranet.
In a small organization such as KM Malta Airlines, the key is to ensure that face-to-face time with all Employees is maintained, where safety is discussed and behaviours are continuously influenced through visible safety leadership and promotion of the airline’s values.
- Curmi highlights that the main challenge going forward is maintaining the momentum and finding simple, yet innovative ways to keep the staff engaged, and maintain a strong focus on safety over time.
In this same context, the airline highlights that it must remain vigilant against complacency as a strong safety performance can itself become a risk, if the organization becomes too comfortable with its own results and gradually lowers its level of vigilance – or, in other words, begins to take safety for granted.
