Theme For The Event Is 'Airline Operational Safety: A Vision For The Future'

EASA's  Annual Safety Conference 2019 'Airline Operational Safety – A Vision for the Future' will take place in Helsinki, Finland November 4-5 2019. Industry stakeholders and aviation regulators have already gone a long way towards ensuring ever safer airline operations. Nevertheless, the landscape keeps evolving and new challenges arise continually – it is no time for complacency.

The headline panel for the conference will feature Joachim Luecking from the European Commission, Pekka Henttu (Head of Traficom and the Chair of the EASA Management Board), EASA Executive Director Patrick Ky in discussions moderated by IATA’s Giancarlo Buono. The panel will look at the current safety challenges facing the aviation industry, the new risks we face and the ways to prepare for them, so as to ensure the long term safety of our industry.

Digitalization in Aviation: The aviation industry is increasingly reliant on digitalisation and this changing technological environment presents new risks that we need to understand and manage. At the same time, technologies such as big data enable us to know more about our operations than ever before. The panel will be led by Jean-Marc Cluzeau from EASA and will include the EASA lead for the Data4Safety program as well as Airbus, Safetyline and Daedalean.

Winter Operations: Analysis shows that winter operations pose particular safety risks across Europe. The risks are mostly well-known, yet operators across Europe and beyond continually struggle to manage these effectively. The panel will be led by Jari Pöntinen from Traficom (CAA Finland) and will include some true experts in this field from EASA, Helsinki Airport, Finnair and Scandinavian Ground Handling.

Aircraft Leasing: The aircraft leasing system poses business challenges for our industry that may also have a knock-on effect for safety of the aviation system. In this panel we will consider best practice as well as the future evolution in aircraft leasing, to ensure that safe operations are built on solid business foundations. The panel will be led by EASA’s Eduard Ciofu and will include experts from airlines, leasing companies, regulators and the European Transport Workers’ Federation.  

Enhancing SMS Resilience: Aircraft operators have been required to have Safety Management Systems (SMS) in place for a number of years. This has had a positive impact, however we need to make sure that SMS is truly implemented as a practical tool to manage safety. The panel will be led by Jari Nisula (Risk in Motion and one of the inventors of the ARMS methodology) as well as experts from EASA, CAA Poland, CANSO/ NATS, Airlines and the European Cockpit Association.

(Source: EASA news release)

FMI: www.easa.europa.eu