The biggest question you might be asking right now is, "What are the top risks and safety issues that my organisation should focus on over the coming months?" Of course this is immediately followed by "What actions should we be taking to ensure these risks are mitigated effectively?"
For specific safety issues a good starting point is the A-Z Section of the Air Ops Community Site. There you will find lots of useful information on a number of different topics and safety risks.
The EASA Annual Safety Review
Another good place to start is the EASA Annual Safety Review. This document is published in the summer each year to review the safety performance of the European aviation system in the previous year. It also compares that performance with the previous 10 years.
On 8 July 2024 the EASA Annual Safety Review (ASR) 2024 was published on the EASA website. You can view the report on the EASA Website here.
The ASR covers all domains of operation including Rotorcraft, General Aviation, Sailplanes and even Drones, for the first time ever in 2024. For this Air Ops Community the key parts of the ASR likely to be of interest to you are:
- Global airline fatal accidents - Page 22.
- Commercial air transport with complex aeroplanes - Page 31.
- Commercial air transport with non-complex aeroplanes - Page 37.
- Aerodromes and ground handling - Page 109.
- ATM/ ANS - Page 116.
- Occurrence Reporting and Risk Classification - Page 122.
How to identify your top risks?
For this article we focus on the top risks and safety issues rather than the solutions themselves. We talk more about solutions and mitigations in the individual articles on the different safety issues.
Your task in any organisation is to identify and mitigate the top risks your operation - this is the most important thing, you must consider the risks specific to what operational activities your organisation is performing.
Some key steps you could take are these:
- Understand the industry baseline: As a starting point, you can use the EASA Annual Safety Review to understand the situation at industry level, particularly in terms of the Key Risk Areas, which are the accident outcomes we are trying to prevent. You can also check the list of safety issues in the Safety Risk Portfolios that are in Volume III of the European Plan for Aviation Safety.
- Consider the specific risks of your activities: While the information at the first step provides a generic industry view, there are likely to be specific risks based on what type of aviation activity you are involved in (flight ops, airport, ground handling etc) and then the more specific things like the routes you fly, aircraft or equipment you use etc.
- Think about the seasonal element: Safety is not static throughout the year. There is a seasonal element that will change your organisation's risk picture over the year. This may be due to the weather conditions, local factors or just the simple fact that everything gets busier when the school holidays start. All these factors introduce seasonal risks that you need to manage at specific times of the year.
- Use your management system to ensure continual learning: You need to have a well functioning management system so that you can use all the data sources available to identify the risks that you and your staff face. Unless you have a working Just Culture and you encourage open conversations about safety and wellbeing then you will miss out on lots of vital intelligence and information to help keep your operation safe in these challenging times.
Use our safety resources to help
This Air Ops Community Site provides lots of different resources to help you to understand more about specific safety issues, understand what mitigations might be effective and then to promote this to your staff.
Feel free to use anything you find on this site, including our Conversation Aviation magazine, to help in your safety efforts.