This paper present the result of a safety culture questionnaire within aircraft maintenance engineering, initially produced by Diaz-Cabrera et al. (2007) was developed and validated leading to a better result of seven factors. This safety culture questionnaire (SCQ) is further used as a tool to do a pilot assessment on the factors retrieved. The report ends with the implementation of literature distilled concepts about safety culture including the validated practical safety assessment tool leading to a complete SMS (Safety Management System) which is both reactive as proactive.To increase aviation safety it is compulsory, since the beginning of 2007, to report occurrences to the quality control. This directive is legislation on occurrence reporting in civil aviation from the European Union. The Occurrence reporting process was also regulated before by EASA Part 145.A.60 although their specific purposes seem to differ.The purpose of the EASA set of regulation and the purpose of the EC regulation are different. The purpose of the EC regulation is to require Member States to put a system in place and to exchange data using the ECC-AIRS tool. The purpose of the EASA regulations on reporting is to ensure continuing airworthiness. It should be noted that the list of reportable occurrences are consistent between the EASA texts and the EC regulation. Therefore there are no plans to harmonize these requirements in a single one (EASA, 2006) Part A.60: "the organization shall report to the competent authority, the state of registry and the organization responsible for the design of the aircraft or the component. There is therefore no direct reporting to the Agency". Although the purposes seem to differ because the EC-directive is primarily for benchmarking with other EU member states and the EASA regulation is to ensure † Email: A.A.Ghobbar@tudelft.nl 2 continuing airworthiness they have one thing in common: an occurrences reporting system (ORS).KLM E&M has an occurrences reporting system in place since 2003. An occurrence reporting system gives information on safety issues in maintenance practices. Errors, violations and misconduct result occurrences that are reported and consequently solved within the maintenance unit. This should ensure that the organization becomes resilient to similar errors in the future. The average number of reported occurrences a year is nearly a thousand, on the one hand one may presume that the safety performance is good but the USO has detected frustrations in the occurrences reporting system (ORS). These frustrations are shown by a number of reports which were reported in the ORS but don't qualify as an occurrence according to the examples given in the directive EU 2003/42/EC. This research has been written at the support unit of the Line Maintenance department. The support unit consists of three project managers and one assistant project manager, respectively in the domain of: communication, enterprise performance system & safety management. The research was done within the support...