Dictionary · 11 pages
The CASRAI Dictionary
1,858 shared terms across 29 research-administration domains, open under CC-BY 4.0.
CRediT · 11 pages
Contributor Roles Taxonomy
14 contributor roles, standardised as ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022 and adopted by thousands of journals.
NIKOLAI · 14 pages
NIKOLAI — Nomenclature & Index for Knowledge Ontologies, Lexicons & AI Interoperability
CASRAI's frontier-AI-safety dictionary — 64 elements crosswalked across ten tracks against real lab and regulator documents.
Implement · 35 pages
Implement CRediT & CASRAI standards
Role-by-role guidance for authors, institutions and publishers — plus the APIs, encodings and integration playbooks behind them.
Guides · 23 pages
Guides & topic clusters
Practical how-to guides organised by topic cluster, plus side-by-side standards comparisons.
News · 4 pages
News & perspectives
Essays, working-group updates, and announcements from the CASRAI community.
About · 9 pages
About CASRAI
Mission, governance, and the community that stewards the standards.
Aviation safety defined from 14 CFR Part 5 and ICAO Annex 19: hazard versus risk, the four SMS components and State versus operator duties.
Written and maintained by CASRAI Editorial Board
Last updated 8 November 2026
Short answer: Aviation safety is the discipline of managing the risk of aircraft accidents and incidents. In current regulation it is organised as a safety management system (SMS) with four components: safety policy, safety risk management, safety assurance and safety promotion. ICAO sets the State-level framework in Annex 19, and the FAA applies an operator-level SMS rule in 14 CFR Part 5.
General information for researchers and safety staff. This is not a compliance opinion for any specific operator.
The regulatory text is more precise than most overviews. 14 CFR 5.3 defines a hazard as “a condition or an object that could foreseeably cause or contribute to an incident or aircraft accident”, and risk as “the composite of predicted severity and likelihood of the potential effect of a hazard.” A hazard is therefore a condition, while risk is a judgement about how severe and how likely its consequence would be. Aviation safety work is the systematic handling of both.
The same section defines the safety management system as “the formal, top-down, organization-wide approach to managing safety risk”. ICAO describes the State Safety Programme (SSP) as the foundation of a proactive safety strategy, implemented alongside service providers’ SMS.
Under 14 CFR 5.5 an SMS must contain at least four components, each with its own subpart of Part 5.
Section 5.5 also requires that the SMS be “appropriate to the size, scope, and complexity of the person’s organization”.
Two layers are often confused. A State manages safety nationally through its SSP, and service providers run an SMS inside their own organisations. The table compares the two instruments as described in the sources below.
Aerospace researchers and test organisations meet these terms in hazard analyses, safety cases and incident reporting. The vocabulary above gives a common baseline: describe the system, identify hazards, assess severity and likelihood, control the risk, then verify that the controls work. For voluntary reporting, see our guide to NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System; for the FAA’s research facility, see the FAA William J. Hughes Technical Center. Analysis methods that transfer include root cause analysis and the critical incident technique. For the wider field see what aerospace engineering is and human factors engineering.
It is the management of risk so that aircraft accidents and incidents are prevented, organised today through safety management systems and State safety programmes.
Safety policy, safety risk management, safety assurance and safety promotion (14 CFR 5.5).
Under 14 CFR 5.1: Part 119 certificate holders and applicants for Part 121 and Part 135 operations, air tour operators holding a 91.147 Letter of Authorization, and holders of both a type certificate and production certificate under Part 21, plus related licensee and applicant cases.
The ICAO Annex on safety management, first applicable on 14 November 2013, which consolidated safety management provisions from six earlier Annexes.
Follow CASRAI
Research-administration guidance, standards updates and independent tool reviews.
Last reviewed: 8 November 2026
Ask CASRAI · free to try
Ask your first 2 questions free below. Subscribers get 150 a day for $29 a month.
An AI assistant specialized in research administration. It cites the sources behind every answer, labels web answers and says when it can't answer.
Answers draw on CASRAI's guides and dictionary plus the federal and funder documents we index: Federal Register, Grants.gov, Regulations.gov and UKRI.
Works on this site and inside Claude, Cursor and the AI tools you already use.
Everything CASRAI publishes — this page, the dictionary, the guides and the news — stays free to read, with no account and no card.
Referenced across the research world
View CASRAI adoption →
Built on open standards
Federated with
One email a month · The CASRAI Bulletin
A six-minute editorial digest of what actually changed in research-administration standards — and what is about to.
No tracking pixels, no click-tracking, never shared with partners or sponsors. One-click unsubscribe. Double opt-in — unconfirmed addresses are deleted within 24 hours.
CASRAI
Standards for Research Administration · Est. 2006 · ISSN (pending)
CASRAI publishes the CASRAI Dictionary and reference material for research-administration information, a programme of The Health Initiative. Content released under CC-BY 4.0 unless otherwise marked. The Contributor Roles Taxonomy is a NISO-stewarded standard (ANSI/NISO Z39.104-2022).
Follow CASRAI
Cite + reuse

source