The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) both agree that the way to improve the overall operational safety record of any aviation organization is by adopting a new and better way to manage safety. This new way is what the experts call the System Safety approach to Operational Safety, better known as a Safety Management System or SMS. SMS is the answer to improving aviation safety worldwide, however just implementing it is not enough, unless the SMS achieves maturity in each organization to which it is applied, it will not achieve its basic objective of constant safety improvement. This paper outlines the most important factors to achieve maturity with an SMS in order to truly lower the risk on a continuous basis, thus making an organization less likely to have incidents and accidents.