The regulation is really effective at the larger airports. It gets very difficult for smaller airports to fulfill all of the requirements, especially when it comes to the audit processes and staying on top of them. It's tough for a small airport to go out and hire a third party consultant at $30,000 to $50,000 to do a full audit. It's tough to have internal people follow up on all the SMS parameters and any issues that need to be followed up in documentation, because SMS is a management program. It's very difficult for smaller airports to maintain.
On May 4th, 2017. See this statement in context.