The airline literature has attracted considerable attention of scholars and significant modelling and empirical reports have been contributed. However, despite being significantly agitated in the recent past in view of unprecedented airline failures, the Nigerian airline industry is least studied. The safety management system (SMS) meant to be a constant measuring tool has been downplayed in research concerning this country’s airline system. To correct this anomaly, this study takes a frontline empirical initiative to prioritize the safety management system components and elements which hitherto has been very challenging and currently being approached by intuition. In this paper, the collective wisdom of experts is integrated into a framework of the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) wherein experienced professionals’ ideas are obtained through questionnaire administration and interviews. The AHP methodology is a classical, merit-driven and validated approach in decision making and applied in this instance to the Nigerian aviation industry. The results indicated an effective prioritization of SMS elements and further validate the efficacy of the AHP model developed originally by Thomas Saaty.