The head of European aviation regulator EASA Florian Guillermet has warned about the risk of complacency to aviation while speaking at the agency’s annual safety conference in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Participants at the conference, which was held on November 12-13, also voted in favor of simplifying aviation rules and smarter regulation.
“In aviation, we have to constantly reconsider how safe we are,” said the European Union Aviation Safety Agency’s executive director Florian Guillermet. “Our discussions show that we are starting to get a better grip on the safety risks at stake today and that we have a common mindset.
“Now we need to come together to take the right actions, including to ensure that we don’t do compliance for the sake of compliance but for the sake of safety, to keep safety standards high, while ensuring we have competitive European aviation industry.”
Complacency can arise as a consequence of the industry’s strong safety performance in the region in recent years and existing rules need to be reviewed, updated and simplified because of the increasingly complex operating landscape. This would create a stronger focus on safety issues, reduce the administrative burden and iron out inconsistencies in the EU’s aviation sector.
EASA said that it has already embarked on EU aviation rule simplification by launching a stakeholder survey.
Speakers at the conference warned that accidents had too often been only narrowly averted in recent years, citing runway incursions and erroneous settings in aircraft altimeters, meaning the pilot has false information on how close the aircraft was to the ground. Lithium batteries presented a growing hazard, they noted, evidenced by recent outbreaks of fire onboard.
For more information and recordings of the conference, see EASA’s event page.
