After the mid-air collision of July 1st, a meeting of the EUROCONTROL
Provisional Council asked for a high level European Advisory Group on ATM
Safety (AGAS) to be set up, to review European ATM safety. This group met for
the first time on 26th September, with representatives from across European ATM
and aviation. The meeting was stimulating and at times spirited, with a real
concern by many participants to achieve something useful and launch some new
and meaningful initiatives to prevent recurrence of such accidents as
Uberlingen/Bodensee and Milan. A major blockage in managing European ATM safety
is the lack of consistent incident reporting across Europe. AGAS will drive
forward with trying to achieve compliance with the regulation
ESARR
2 which requires incident reporting by all ECAC states. See the
press release. AGAS provided
an initial set of recommendations to the Provisional Council at the beginning
of November, some of which have now been submitted to member states for
approval. These include ACAS and Human Factors issues.
AGAS has
established working groups to look at a range of key issues, such as
implementation of safety regulations, reporting of accident/incident data, ACAS
and safety nets. The Group will also consider work currently being undertaken
by EUROCONTROL on Airport Safety and Human Factors.
The final AGAS action plan will be presented to the Provisional Council
in April 2003. At that point AGAS will disappear and the issues in the plan
will be subsumed by the appropriate bodies. The EEC's R&D business area,
amongst others, will be expected to carry out certain research projects as yet
to be defined by AGAS.
The EEC's Safety R&D group carried out its
own informal accident analysis in July, based on information available at the
time from various sources, which led to a number of insights, some of which
have been communicated to AGAS for consideration. Furthermore, the ACAS group
here at the EEC have been supporting the official investigation into the
accident. Such work is confidential, but it is anticipated that the official
legal investigation led by the German authorities (BFU) will make its
conclusions public in early 2003.
Additional
Links
A description of the accident is available on the website of the
Bundesstelle für Flugunfalluntersuchung
BFU - German Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accidents Investigation
Glossary