Conversation Aviation 2-2025 - Winter Readiness

Facing Winter Together – Highlights from the Winter 2025 Edition of Conversation Aviation

Winter operations remain one of aviation’s most complex safety environments — where preparation, procedure, and human performance intersect.
The Conversation Aviation Winter Edition brings together lessons, insights, and expert reflections on how to manage these challenges across all levels of operation.

In his foreword, Francesco Gaetani, EASA’s new Flight Standards Director, reminds operators that “we cannot control the weather, but we can control how we prepare for it.” He highlights the importance of mindset, compliance, and collaboration — three elements that define resilient safety performance in winter.

This edition explores these topics, which are being published and promoted over the coming weeks as individual topics. Links are provided as and when they are published:

• Safety Management Systems — focusing on the need for a purpose-driven SMS, where compliance serves learning, not bureaucracy.
• Top Winter Safety Issues - what are the main risks to focus on at this time of year. 
• Winter Mindset - the importance of shifting your mindset and that of your organisation to the different challenges that winter weather brings. 
• Turbulence and Fatigue — managing invisible risks in the air and cumulative fatigue on the ground.
• De-icing and Holdover Times — why correct application and monitoring of fluids remain critical barriers against airframe icing.
• Contaminated Runways and the Global Reporting Format — improving pilot decision-making through standardised friction data.
• Ramp and Cabin Safety — preventing slips, injuries, and contamination carry-over from de-icing fluids.
• Human Performance Themes — such as Checklist Drift and Mental Health in the Dark Season, emphasising awareness, discipline, and wellbeing.

Across all topics, one message stands out: winter operations are not just about equipment or weather — they are about people.
From pilots to ramp teams, dispatchers to maintenance crews, everyone contributes to safety through mindset and action.

The magazine invites safety professionals to share these lessons and adapt them locally — because every winter is different, but the principles of safe operation never change.