SAFE360 2025 - Summary

SAFE360° 2025 Short Summary

Cologne, 30 September – 1 October 2025

SAFE360° 2025 brought together more than 150 participants from airlines, ANSPs, airports, manufacturers, authorities, and associations. The forum had a new format to encourage even more open and cross-domain dialogue under Chatham House rules. It combined technical insights, operational experience, and collaborative reflection to enable discussion on Europe’s most pressing aviation safety challenges.

In line with the best aviation safety traditions, two SPIs were set for the event. In this case the “Sierra” stood for Success and the goal was not to be “ALARP” but “AHARP” – As High As Reasonably Practicable. These being:

• Rate of interaction of the audience
• Number of takeaways – the things people learnt and things to think about when they went back to their organisations. 

Day 1 – Building Shared Understanding

Safety Risk Management – What Does “Good” Look Like?

• Participants explored what effective safety risk management means in practice, moving beyond compliance towards meaningful risk awareness.
• “Compliance is not enough” emerged as a recurring theme, underlining the need for harmonised and proactive safety performance indicators (SPIs).
• Discussions highlighted the importance of empathy, clear safety goals, and the transformation of data into knowledge that supports effective safety decision-making.

Safety Landscape – Do We Share the Same View?

Industry experts examined both systemic and operational safety challenges. Systemic topics included: 

• The Aviation System: The need to build a more resilient system that does not reach the workload limit of the system so frequently. We are structured to manage a steady state and need to better handle the constant change of a challenging world. We cannot legitimise practical drift. 
• Safety Culture and Mindset: How do we assess the invisible? Safety culture involves people and emotions – we need to get better at having difficult conversations together, in a constructive way. 
• The Role of the Safety Manager: Safety Manager’s should have a close connection with the operation, smelling the kerosene and grease more often. How do we create a system that ensure they don’t get stuck in paper safety.
• Risk Management: A more integrated, proactive approach is vital to identify situations with potential risks and not waiting for safety reports to arrive before taking actions. It also needs to work across organisations and not just locally in individual organisations. We need to improve the Safety Performance Indicators (SPIs) we use to move beyond compliance and ensure they are aligned with our safety goals and objectives. 
• Technology: There is an increasing complexity of equipment, which combined with new generations who have less traditional airmanship and reliance on the machine. Additionally, AI has a great power which means great responsibilities (spiderman).
• People: Workforce turnover, attracting new staff and knowledge transfer gaps. In a safe system, we need to help new generations see that accidents are possible. On mental health, the system should make it easier for people to declare mental impediments without fear. 

Operational topics included:

• Runway incursions. 
• Runway excursions. 
• Mid air collision risks and wake turbulence.
• Conflict Zones.  
• Climate change and turbulence encounters. 
• Drones (increase of operations and implementation of new regulations).
• Bird/ wildlife strikes.
• Lithium battery fires. 
• Solar panel farms.
• Operational topics included: 
• Calls were made to “make aviation attractive again” to new generations, ensuring continuity of competence across domains.
• The Data4Safety (D4S) update showcased the growing potential of collaborative data analysis in identifying emerging risks.
• The first day closed with consensus that risk management must be cross-organisational and intelligence-driven, not isolated within individual entities.  We do safety together, not alone in our silos. This is very foundation of SAFE360°.

Day 2 – 360° Operational Focus

Approach Path and Energy Management (APM)

• Discussions between flight operations and ATM specialists addressed stabilised approach criteria, pilot monitoring practices, provision of track miles during initial phase of vectoring and balancing automation with manual flying skills.
• Key messages included the need for clearer SOPs, proportionate rulemaking, and stronger safety promotion on go-around policies and soft skills.
• As part of the EASA Safety Risk Management (SRM) process two new concepts were presented: 
  • New Approach Phase Concept: Energy management and configuration planning begins at or before FL100 with predefined steps. This cannot always be respected and are not mandatory but might help the crew in maintain an active awareness of energy situation and ease the detection of possible high energy situation.
  • Safe Landing Concept: The introduction of the concept will ensure to cross the threshold at appropriate speed, crew to monitor appropriate speed reduction from the threshold until touchdown, touchdown on the appropriate, and agreed upon, point on the runway and Initiate a go-around if appropriate speed, speed reduction, or touch down point is not achieved. 
• EASA assessed mitigation measures further and concluded that to allow pilots manage energy during approach phase of flight, a best Air Traffic Control (ATC) practice of some airports, which is to inform pilots about remaining “TRACK MILES/DISTANCE TO TOUCHDOWN” when vectoring or assigning a direct routing during initial contact at the approach phase of flight might be widened to all airports. Such requirement are also enforced since August 2025 for ATCO approach training.

Preventing Mid-Air Collisions

• The session emphasised the need for all airspace users to be conspicuous so everyone could see each other (including through new iConspicuity systems for non-commerical traffic). 
• Participants noted continuing data gaps in GA activity and supported wider use of connected-aircraft technologies.
• One solution could be to extend the concept of “Runway Safety Teams” to “Airspace Safety Teams” to bring together stakeholders at specific locations to work together on mitigations. 

Runway Incursions

• Practical initiatives were presented including the “Triple One” concept (one runway, one frequency, one language), onboard solutions, ground movement surveillance and continuous Stop Bar use. 
• Participants gave feedback on which of the presented barriers they see the need for further regulatory intervention. Strong focus was also placed on stakeholder collaboration and on sharing best practices through safety promotion. 

SAFE 360° 2025 – Key Points

• We cannot erode our safety margins. Organisations remain compliant but face growing workload and complexity; resilience must be improved through better system-wide coordination.
• Workforce and competence: High turnover, ageing demographics and changing career expectations call for renewed focus on training and knowledge transfer.
• Integrated risk management: Siloed approaches must evolve into harmonised, data-driven systems that support early hazard identification and effective risk management.
• Human performance: Empathy, emotional awareness, and mental well-being are essential elements of Just Culture.
• Data4Safety: The next phase of Data4Safety will expand the availability of quality data and accelerate insight-driven mitigation.
• Forward path: Discussions will continue at the EASA Annual Safety Conference in Copenhagen (12–13 November 2025), maintaining continuity and collaboration across domains.

SAFE 360° 2025 once again demonstrated the power of collective learning. Through open exchange, shared responsibility, and practical insight, Europe’s aviation community continues to strengthen its safety foundations — together.