DAVID LEARMOUNT / LONDON
Organisation to launch plan at ATC providers meeting
Eurocontrol is to launch a strategic safety action plan at a meeting of top executives from its member states' air traffic service providers in Brussels on 17 February.
The aim is to kick start programmes to tackle safety priorities, including a Europe-wide shortage of air traffic controllers, the need to correct measurable differences in national air traffic management (ATM) standards and practices, and concerns over runway incursions.
Eurocontrol has drawn up a roadmap of objectives to maintain safety standards as airspace grows ever more congested and the continent progresses towards the Single European Sky. The organisation says it wants to ensure there is "an understanding that the status quo is not an option, improvements are needed, and speed is vital", hence the meeting that it describes as "the European strategic safety action plan launch event".
Its high-level European Action Group for Aviation Safety (AGAS), assembled after the July 2002 fatal mid-air collision between a Bashkirian Airlines Tupolev Tu-154 and a DHL Airways Boeing 757 over southern Germany, was given the task of accelerating an existing programme to identify the safety priorities for future European ATM, and to draft action plans. Although Eurocontrol tacitly admits that a few of the more complex action programmes are more evolutionary than revolutionary, the AGAS name was no accident - it is an action group, not a working group, it says.
When they meet at Eurocontrol's Brussels headquarters next month, the leaders of "all stakeholders in European ATM" will take part in a day of presentations and "brainstorming" to examine the "action plan for ATM safety in Europe", led by Eurocontrol director general Victor Aguado, director of ATM programmes George Paulson and moderated by Flight International. Human factors guru and industrial psychologist Professor James Reason will be putting the wider context for challenges in a human-centred industry.The main priorities for action include safety related human resources in ATM; incident reporting and data sharing systems; resolution of airborne collision avoidance practices, the weaknesses of which were shown up by the accident over Germany; Eurocontrol safety regulatory requirements; runways and runway safety; and safety research and development.
Source: Flight International
