DAVID LEARMOUNT/ LONDON
A study sparked by the mid-air collision over Germany last year uncovers widespread disregard of standards
Eurocontrol safety regulatory requirements (ESARRS) are ignored in "some [member] states", and Europe has no central system for monitoring air traffic management (ATM) safety standards, says the final report of the high-level European action group for aviation safety (AGAS). AGAS was set up immediately after the 1 July 2002 mid-air collision between a DHL Boeing 757 and a Bashkirian Airlines Tupolev Tu-154M over Uberlingen, southern Germany, to accelerate measures to identify, prioritise and act on ATM safety problems, define European standards more clearly, and improve compliance with ESARRS.
Although industry expected that the review would deal directly with known issues such as eliminating ambiguity in airborne collision avoidance system (ACAS) guidelines and measures to reduce runway incursions, AGAS discovered more basic measures were critical. The European ATM system, according to AGAS, must quickly train more air traffic control officers (ATCO) - of which there is a serious shortage; develop standardised guidelines for selecting and training ATCOs; establish a safety culture among ATCO teams; establish proper ATCO team procedures for dealing with equipment outages and transition to new systems; and develop "cross-border regulations functions".
Although human factors (HF) and human resources topped the list of priority items, the safety league table also included:
the need for incident reporting and data sharing; on ACAS, the report says: "The application of procedures, internationally, has been shown to be sometimes inconsistent. This needs to be addressed urgently". Also, Eurocontrol should accelerate its work on the means for downlinking ACAS resolution advisories - the onboard advice to pilots of critically conflicting aircraft on how to manoeuvre to avoid each other. The issues are technical feasibility and HF aspects, says the report; air traffic management "safety net systems" like short/medium term conflict alert (S/MTCA) need to be more widely used; runway incursion; enforcement of ESARRs and monitoring their implementation; safety and HF research.The report says: "Although Eurocontrol states have an obligation to implement ESARRs...implementation has been slow in some states with the result of a mixed achievement across Europe...more needs to be done to encourage states to implement ESARRs." It explains that "a few states have well defined safety strategies...[but] the majority...have some way to go before their systems reach maturity".
Compliance with ESARRs and International Civil Aviation Organisation standards would eliminate almost all listed problems except the lack of good HF practices, the shortage of controllers, and the lack of an incident reporting system, AGAS makes clear. To kick-start action the AGAS team has condensed its findings into a 16-page glossy pamphlet describing the "high-priority areas", detailing what action is required by whom, and the timescale for completion. This will be distributed to "all stakeholders" in the next two weeks, says Eurocontrol.
The chairman of Eurocontrol's safety regulation commission Phillip Griffith opened the provisional council meeting that approved the AGAS report with the words: "There needs to be more leadership and commitment because otherwise none of this will happen."
Source: Flight International
