Maximising Safety Benefits in
a Visible and Traceable Way
Why a
Safety Management System?
Safety
Objectives at the EEC
The
objective for safety in Air Traffic Management is to ensure that the numbers of
ATM induced accidents do not increase and, where possible, decrease. Since demand for air travel is expected to
double by 2015/2020, this implies that the rate of accidents per flight hour
must be halved. The achievement of the
Targets Level of Safety (TLS) under anticipated traffic conditions requires an
increase in safety along with the implementation of the EUROCONTROL strategy
towards the 2020 vision of the ATM Master Plan.
This vision includes automation support (tools) for the controller as
well as airspace and procedural changes, with significant impact on controller
working practices and potentially safety culture. Because there is so much
change envisaged, there is a need for a significant, integrated and explicit
safety effort. Furthermore, although
safety in the past has been relatively high in ATM compared to other
industries, this cannot be assumed for the future, especially given the rate of
change and the increases in capacity foreseen.
The achievement of tolerable safety as a quantified performance target
is afforded the highest priority.
The
main objective of the EUROCONTROL Experimental Centre (EEC) is to organise and
conduct support to validation, applied and innovative Research and Development
(R & D) activities to pave the way towards the European ATM Master Plan
vision. Alongside the delivery of the
evolutions necessary in achieving the vision, the EEC has to assure the safety
of this future vision of ATM. The EEC is
committed to Safety.
Research
into accidents, and incidents has shown that underlying causes are often
associated with organisational and management inadequacies. Similarly, many accidents and incidents have
their root causes in design, and it is therefore the responsibility of
definition, conceptualisation and design work to consider how safety problems
could occur.
Why
a Safety Management System?
A
safety management system (SMS) is a way of ensuring a high degree of safety in
an organisation’s activities. As
presented in Eurocontrol
Safety Regulatory Requirements 3 (ESARR3) “Safety management is that
function of service provision, which ensures that all safety risks have been
identified, assessed and satisfactorily mitigated. A formal and systematic approach to safety
management will maximise safety benefits in a visible and traceable way”. For the EEC, the development of new concepts
carries with it a responsibility to determine both the safety benefits of those
concepts, and the potential weaknesses that these concepts might incur when
implemented in operational centres. This safety information must be fed forward
to our industrial stakeholders and European ANSPs. However, whilst having an
SMS is considered best practice, it is less common for a R&D centre to have
an SMS which can have a real impact on the safety of its products. The SMS needs
to be adapted to our activities at the EEC, both to make sure that we tailor it
to our actual activities and existing processes, and also to ensure we do not
simply end up with more bureaucracy, which actually adds little safety value.
This process of adaptation is helped by the fact that there are already quite a
lot of safety assessment activities now occurring in certain projects, and it
is possible to see what is working in terms of safety for the EEC, and what is
not.
The
EEC has committed to the development of a SMS which, from the very first stages
of ATM projects (namely development of concepts and ideas and design), will
reduce the chance of initiating errors and violations and will increase the
effectiveness of existing barriers or will enable the development of adequate
new barriers. This will help to prevent
accidents and ensure safety ‘coherence’ in the future vision of ATM.
Formalising
the safety processes will ensure that:
- We carry out safety
R&D on all aspects and elements of the future ATM system;
- We plan required
resources to assess the changes in the aviation landscape and their
implications for safety;
- We conduct training
programmes designed to teach, motivate and sustain safety performance;
- We develop an Integrated
Risk Model showing the relative safety contributions of different systems
as part of the future ATM vision thereby ensuring that when put together,
all aspects remain safe and resilient;
- We achieve safety
benefits in the most cost-efficient manner and in the shortest time
possible;
- We disseminate safety
information and lessons learnt to all stakeholders involved, in an
efficient and timely manner.
Compatibility
with ESARR3
Our
SMS framework will consist (fully in line with ESARR3) of five key activities:
|
Figure 1: Safety
Management System – Key Activities and Continual Improvement |
Figure 1
illustrates the five key activities of the Safety Management System arranged
into a continual improvement loop. The arrow spiraling up, indicates that
assurance and promotion together should ensure that the SMS continually
improves and, with it, safety performance. |
What
has been done so far?
The
first step to introducing a formalized SMS was the conduct of a Baseline
Assessment within the EEC, which describes the current situation, i.e. the current level of maturity. It was
based on a structured assessment tool known as a River Diagram. The tool was initially developed from the DNV
(Det Norske Veritas) auditing system and
then customized to suit the air traffic navigation domain, and was first used
at the Head Quarters of EUROCONTROL in
What
happens next?
The
prioritized Gap Analysis is now being condensed into a series of focused
Implementation Projects. These
Implementation Projects are being put into a logical order for developments in
the EEC SMS Implementation Plan.
Contacts
Eric Perrin
EEC SMS Implementation Project Manager, EEC – mailto:eric.perrin@eurocontrol.int
Barry Kirwan
Safety
R&D Co-ordinator, EEC - mailto:barry.kirwan@eurocontrol.int
Links
SRC deliverables
(including ESARR3)