A Few Notes on the EUROCONTROL Safety R&D Seminar

A Few Notes on the EUROCONTROL Safety R&D Seminar
by Ali Riza SARAL
Barcelona, Spain
25-27 October 2006

EUROCONTROL held a Safety R & D Seminar at Barselona late October 2006. This seminar took place in a decade that is marked not only by change in ATC technologies but also a continued trend of increase in air traffic. It must be noted that the increase in the air traffic is dramatic. For example the air traffic has risen from approx. 2000 flights per day to 4000 flights per day at KARLDAP central Germany and Europe. This is not a fast and natural load increase in a brand new system. The KARLDAP system is at the edge of a big transition to a brand new one and the technical staff is almost getting retired as a whole…

Big investments are being made for new systems… Yet Europe has seen her worst air traffic accident at Switzerland in this decade… Managers need to have objective methods and tools to justify new costs… The aviation industry is faced with increasing pressure to minimize its costs… Rationalisation sometimes causes experienced ATCOs to work two shifts 8 hours per day as DSF did in late 1990s…

These tendencies are reflected in the Swedish presentation on the “Impact of change processes on safety culture and organizational climate” and “Swed Lund Operational Readiness in Transition” and a not so good other presentation about the Switzerland accident “Human reaction to safety nets”…

I have witnessed the German KARLDAP and Turkish systems and I have not been able to find a comprehensive definition of SAFETY in these places… People are working with rule of thumbs and mutually FELT and SHARED feelings of safety but not objective understandings of it… The traffic load is increasing substantially but no one can judge what is exactly safe and what is not – accept to a certain degree simulation guys… IATA comes into the arena with the “IATAData driven approach to ATM Safety” presentation in the EUROCONTROL seminar.

In order to measure whether a system is safe or not, one must first identify which risks associated with which hazards to measure… Here comes a group of presentations, first two by NLR “NLR Identification of emergent hazards and behaviour” and “NLR Identification of emergent hazards and behaviour”, and a special case “The Functional Resonance Accident Model” and last one from FAA “Human Error Safety Risk Analysis FAA Human Factors Research Group”…

Part of the problem arises from not having the data at all “Confidential Reporting”… Reporting methods, organization and environment are important according to EUROCONTROL presentation which indicates a method and independent Safety Group organisation. “Eliciting Info for Safety Assessment” is a similar presentation…

Once the data is gathered we have to assess it according to a method in order to evaluate the safety of our system… NLR steps in once more with the “NLR Need_for_novel_approach_to_aviation_safety_validation” article along with “resilience in safety assessment”.

Safety culture is the key phrase that is most emphasized in the seminar presentations… “ATM Safety Maturity Model”, “Boeing Safety Culture Survey”, Swedish “safety management system”, “UK Safety Regulation Group” presentation are noteworthy. I am impressed by the FAA, UK and NLR presentations but the Swedish quality and amount of work at most…