What is aviation safety focusing on in 2022? Join us in our forward-looking horizon scan for one of the most important years in aviation.
From a safety point of view, the biggest challenge in 2022 will be managing the return to — and expansion beyond — traffic levels seen before COVID-19 hit.
“We remain hopeful that the biggest change in aviation in 2022 will be the return of pre-pandemic passenger and traffic volumes,” Andy Cebula, vice president of Nextgen and new entrants at trade association Airlines for America, tells us. “As traffic increases to 2019 levels, we must remain vigilant in identifying any concerns associated with the increase in operations and address them before they become a safety event or incident.”
“The transition from a COVID-19 environment to pre-pandemic levels of operations is a keen focus of the aviation industry, and we have identified a host of measures within the industry to monitor, identify and manage those risks,” Cebula says.
Airline trade body IATA, the International Air Transport Association, is moving forward with its Safety Strategy, presented earlier this year.
“The new strategy is focused on delivering a holistic approach to mitigating identified aviation hazards and safety risks. It is built on three pillars: Safety Leadership, Safety Risk and Safety Connect,” Mark Searle, safety director for the association, tells us.
While the Safety Leadership pillar revolves around promoting a positive safety culture, Searle says, “The Safety Risk pillar reflects the fact that COVID-19 created a number of challenges for aviation as it adapted to a rapidly changing landscape. The IATA COVID-19 Safety Risk Management Framework was developed to keep track of these changes and act as a central repository to share information on identified issues, and how they were being addressed during the pandemic.”
As this work evolves, Searle explains, “Going forward this has become the Safety Risk Management framework. It will interface with the IATA Global Aviation Data Management (GADM) programs to ensure any intelligence, identified from data trends, is fed into the Framework to highlight any emerging issues.”
The Safety Connect pillar, meanwhile, focuses on linking IATA members together and to the organisation, sharing best practice and offering sources of support, knowledge, skills and experience.
“IATA’s long-term safety goal is to reduce the five year accident rate, so that each five year period is safer than the last,” Searle says, highlighting the improvements between the running five-year periods of 2016–2020, 2017–2021, and so on. “Each year, as safety improves, this becomes a bit more difficult because the low-hanging fruit have been picked. But it also requires us to dig more deeply into the industry safety and incident reporting databases like GADM, to find new opportunities to make us even safer.”
Analysis of data within safety programmes to identify systemic issues, performing root cause analysis and then developing mitigation strategies for risks will continue to be aviation’s collective safety bread and butter.
“These collective efforts are addressed in several ways including through participation in the Commercial Aviation Safety Team (CAST) which enables industry stakeholders to share data and analysis within the Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing (ASIAS) program,” Airlines for America’s Cebula highlights. “We look forward to seeing the continued evolution of these programs in the year ahead, including further integration of machine learning capabilities.”
Cebula also expects the expansion of safety management systems and the FAA’s implementation of the Pilot Records Database rule, finalised in 2021 for implementation in 2022, to make aviation even safer.
Further milestones for the year are the US Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic control modernisation, particularly the work around controller-pilot data link communications, also known as en route data comm, within the National Air Space. L3 Harris data presently cites over 5,900 aircraft equipped, having performed more than 11 million data comm flights and saved more than two million minutes of airspace user time.
Look out also for aircraft (or airplane) health management, wider usage of ADS-B flight tracking, increased use of turbulence awareness programs and continuing rollout of new technologies across air traffic management — all the while continuing to build data-sharing and knowledge-sharing platforms to make the most of the safety information and knowledge held within the industry.
Author: John Walton
Published 24th March 2022
;
