March Safety Update

Early in March the whole secretariat was in Amsterdam for the CEO conference and ATC Global. These are a perfect forum for us to meet and discuss the progress of the Workgroups and to ensure alignment of all the CANSO objectives.

I also had a face to face session with the ExCom champion for Safety, Hank Krakowski, COO of the FAA Air Traffic Organization. Hank is very pleased with the work we have been doing and the progress that has been made. We specifically discussed developing a closer relationship with IATA safety groups and to this end, I will be meeting with Chris Glaser in the next couple of months.

This was followed by the first Operations Conference which I attended with Graham Wadeson, chair of the operational safety work group. We were there to provide a clear link between operations and safety and to assess what joint activities we should be focusing on.

The pace of work was maintained between 15-19 March when the drafting group for the SMS Implementation guide met in London. The session ended with some of the chapters being sent to the technical authors, a few needing minor changes
and a couple requiring significant revision. The whole guide will be in final draft form ready for the Global ATM summit in June in Oslo.

The group were joined at the end of the week by additional CANSO members and representatives from Eurocontrol to discuss the SMS maturity metric. This was an opportunity for CANSO members to become familiar with the metric that Eurocontrol have been running and that has been used for European CANSO members for some years. The SMS Workgroup and Metrics Workgroup will now take this learning away and look at developing a CANSO measure to support our rollout of SMS across the CANSO membership.

To finish this month I would like to look ahead to a very busy month for me. In April I will be spreading the CANSO safety message in the Middle East at a meeting of the regional work group chairs, and Asia Pacific where I will be attending the APAC conference and meeting with the hosts of the Global Safety Seminar - CAAS Singapore. The SSC will also be running a regional safety seminar with speakers from the FAA, NATS and Airservices Australia. This is a follow on from the workshop last November.