EUROCONTROL and European partners provide significant contribution during ICAO Global Runway Safety Symposium

At the ICAO Global Runway Safety Symposium, which took place in Montreal on 24-26 May, EUROCONTROL together with the European Commission, EASA and ECAC addressed the issue of runway safety (both incursion and excursion), one of the top safety risk areas in aviation. 450 participants attended this event which aimed at coordinating a global effort and identifying a common framework for improving runway safety.

The workshop addressed the following topics:

• measuring runway safety,
• harvesting the full power of sharing safety data,
• harmonisation issues and collaborative responses to prevent and mitigate incursions and excursions.

It also identified that local runway safety teams are key to implementing the measures to prevent runway incursions and excursions such as those found in the new European Action Plan for the Prevention of Runway Incursions. Nancy Graham, President of the Air Navigation Board of ICAO, proposed the practice of solving local issues at an aerodrome through a multi-disciplinary team as a best practice to be repeated across the ICAO regions.

“Every airport is different and that means solutions have to be relevant for every case. But that doesn’t mean that each airport should work totally in isolation. We can still learn from each other – both in understanding the problems and in developing solutions”, said Bo Redeborn, Principle Director ATM at EUROCONTROL. “We can and we should harmonise globally. Training is also best done jointly – to ensure consistency of approach. After all, most pilots do have this strange habit of visiting more than one airport,” he added.

An updated version of the European Action Plan for the Prevention of Runway incursions, written by operational experts and based on lessons learned was issued in advance of this workshop; it is one example of the excellent work undertaken by individual airports, states and international bodies such as IFALPA, IFATCA, ACI, CANSO, the Flight Safety Foundation and EUROCONTROL.

Another example is SKYbrary a most trustworthy source of safety knowledge that brings to the finger tips of aviation experts various toolkits, training packages, documentation, reports, and safety videos.

“I am very much in favour of setting safety performance targets because these drive improvements. However we should be cautious in what we select as indicators and targets not to destroy all the hard work of safety and operational experts. We are committed to continue our contribution to ICAO and organise in 2012 and 2013 in partnership with CANSO European regional Runway safety workshops, such as the regional event on Runway Safety which is planned at the ATC Global in Amsterdam on 8th of March 2012,” concluded Bo Redeborn.