ECAST PLENARY MEETING 02/08 at EASA
MEETING SUMMARY by NON-EXEC
The Agenda.
The Draft Minutes from the Meeting.
John Vincent chair. Peter Sorensen absent. Michel Masson secretary. Greetings Introductions etc.
John stated that the ECAST was there to provide the EASA rule making division with the best possible advice from industry. This to enable the EASA SMS legal framework to be available in the New Year 08-09. He opined that the diverse SMS strands that exist globally were tending to slow everything down, such that the Global Flight Safety roadmap was ‘slipping’.
2.Agenda, as published approved, with the addition of an item under 8d/ 8c(2)
CAST report wrt to TCAS ‘RA’s in the
3 Minutes of meeting 01/08 held 19 March 08 accepted – Note that these are always published in full on CIRCA website.
4
Actions from the previous meeting, see end papers
of the bundle, listed therein in reverse order.
Action 1 Closed as an Ongoing task with Thor and Michel.
Action 2 Closed
Action 3 Done, as this permitted the SMS wg to commence business under
Dave Prior chairmanship.
Action 4 On this meeting agenda
Action 5. Ditto.
Action 6 Completed by EASA staff and delegate feedback
Action 7 Ongoing Open as P Sorensen absent 02/08 meeting
Action 9 Agenda item 6b today.
Action 10 Agenda item 8a today
5.
JSSI-ESSI action plan – John Vincent reminded
delegates of the Airbus letter published on CIRCA and how both Regional and
sub-Regional areas should be created, with a reporting structure back to ECAST.
This would use the ICAO and Asian CAST models with ‘Implementation’ being a
keyword. Needs agreement in detail and a reporting timeline as essential. Little support at this meeting for the
regional teams.
I responded to this with the comment that commitment to any wg so formed is
key. Many times a plenary meeting will demand a certain course of action to
progress, with plenary agreement, but the ‘nuts and bolts’ stuff suffers from
poor commitment. So don’t attempt to deliver something without the commitment
strategy being agreed beforehand.
Following a few further comments, John V summarised the point that while this action plan is highly desirable, it is not currently practicable. EASA already has a mandate, but there is a perceived lack of clarity about reasons for, boundaries and focus points. He suggested that we look towards those nations not within ECAST. The CAST model allows for both plenary teams and w g. teams The ECAST has no executive authority so volunteer commitment will be necessary to make progress in anything we attempt to do. So from the CAST legacy list of areas of Level 1 Risk, Cargo, Icing, Maintenance Systems, Mid-Air collisions, Turbulence and Runway Incursions
This prompted a response from Thor J, who opined that it was essential that we were comparing like with like in terms of Incident database stats. He felt that there might be 80% convergence between the CAST source data and our regional databases. Action agreed to ensure that this comparison is made. NB This point came up several times at this meeting.
6.
ECAST work packages.
a) SMS. Dave Prior updated the meeting on their progress with the comment that at their first wg meeting on 24/04/08 the UK CAA were, somewhat surprisingly, absent.
He produced a ‘
(i) Review SMS wrt current cultures, initiatives and methodology
(ii) Identify Best practices and examples of these from member organisations
(iii) Identify the Hazards using the ICAO definitions and emphasis on ‘Potential’
(iv) Risk assessment – mapping against Insurer’s agreed profile.
Deliverables will appear in Skybrary via
the EASA website by
Discussion – from (iii) above, we have such a wide diversity of data based ‘potentials’. There is a potential dichotomy between SMS ideal and commercial reality, particularly wrt defect rectification and dispatch under DDM/MEL. (Personal comment. This appeared around 15-20 years ago, when I first got offered a plane in transit with a defect that I knew the station could fix. I had trained the engineers involved when they were apprentices, but they declined to fix the defect as it was a DDM item and to fix the defect would spoil their outstation schedule regularity target! Many times I approached the fleet offices to get DDM items reviewed against Risk, but only ‘won’ very rarely, which meant I ‘failed’ the reality check )
See Skybrary for evidence of any progress. ‘Safety’ as imposed cannot be sustained from a ‘top-down’ imperative. It does work, where all the stakeholders provide agreed data that proves ‘continuous improvement’, thus demonstrating a ‘safety culture’ FDM is a classic example of this.
From the
0.8 Runway Incursions per 100K movements. ‘Performance’ will reveal compliance or failure, and above all, why.
There was a lot more discussion about all this and if you want it all, I can let you have it. See what comes with the Minutes first.
Airline Risk Management Systems or ARMS.
Conflict or Agreement with ECAST? Both see ‘their way’ as holistic, so why waste energy on parallel development? ECAST sees that they have the ability to promote awareness and believes that full advantage can be taken from them.
Lunch
6b Ground Safety. Chair advised that in the absence of Peter Sorensen that all items on this topic be deferred until he was able to attend. Given the list -Loading, Ground Handling, Maintenance, Icing
I told the meeting that a lot of work had been done within UKFSC about these topics already. I offered to take this aspect back to the CEO UKFSC for him to promote within UKFSC as a means of helping ECAST. Chair responded by saying that Ground Safety needs a ‘champion’ along the SMS wg lines. I could not commit UKFSC to this as resources would be needed. What have FSF done on these topics? What does IATA have to offer too? ECAST needs to formulate detailed TORs for this and establish concrete proposals.
7. Future Meetings. Wednesday 15 October 08 for 03/08 and Wednesday 17 December 08 for 04/08. The 04/08 meeting will approve the SMS wg output product for onward transmission to the EASA rule making sector. The Analysis team will meet end August in conjunction with the absent co-chair.
8. Taken out of order.
8b. EASA Annual safety review. Not well received by the meeting, with open disagreement across the tables. It seems that EASA are working to a different Incident/Accident database and so any comparison with other parts of the world is flawed. EASA accounts for >25% of global commercial air transport. The reporter made lots of ‘surmission s’ with little in the way of explanation and the very attractive lady delegate from the Netherlands, sitting next to me wrote ‘rubbish’, on her laptop.
Action. Chair agreed to check sources used to compare and report back.
Also in 8b was a Eurocontrol report. They have a Safety Culture going back 3-4 years
and derived from the Nuclear Accident at
For Eurocontrol, their Safety Culture is based on ‘what is believed’ ‘what is said’ and ‘what is done’. Safety Performance compares SMS with their own culture and identifies Competence as an SMS driver and Commitment as the cultural deliverable. Together they provide a Safe ‘Air Navigation Service Provision’ ANSP.
Their review will show where SMS isn’t
working, what is blocking it and identify potential solutions. This was Good
Stuff and very well received. There will be an ATM Safety Culture workshop 5-6 November 08?
8a. On-Board Airport Nav Systems. OANS. Gerard Guyot of Airbus gave an overdue and heavily accented but nevertheless interesting outline of their A380 system and the potential to retrofit A330/A340 aircraft too. From 2011, the OANS will also include other aircraft traffic information. ‘Brake to Vacate’ option will be programmable and hence automatically ‘adjust auto-brake selections’. Overrun Protection too. They have already trialled this on an A340 and seek certification soon. He compared the OANS with RAAS and concluded that both will mitigate Runway Incursion risk. Strong conclusions.
8c.
CAST update Frank Stadmeyer of the FAA. Very busy
and hastily delivered presentation with vast amounts of seemingly unrelated
information! They believe that capacity is expected to triple by 2025 and that
the current accident rate has to decline by a factor of 3 to ‘stand still’ He
proposed a radical ‘prognostic process of data analysis’ to support the SMS
drive. As an example of the need for clarity, he defined a taxonomy goal with a
detailed example. If you fly into
8d.
TCAS ‘RA’s Comparison made between the
8c CAST again. Their Safety Plan is 67% complete and details will be in CIRCA.
FAST – Future Aviation Safety Team – does this include VLJs? Rudi de Hertog of FAST pointed the meeting to the Skybrary and offered assistance to the ECAST on the SMS wg.
9. Communication. UKFSC and FOCUS got a mention as they used this to evangelise the European Strategic Safety Initiative –ESSI.
10. AOB Nil
11.
Wrap. Chair opined that progress had been made
towards an evolving SMS and that, de facto, the standard for any new rule
making within EASA will improve. He pleaded with the meeting to ensure that we
reach agreement on the SMS wg output/proposals by the end of meeting 04/08 in
December. He clearly wants somebody to grasp the Ground safety parallel wg
chair and make some progress here. If
this had come up 8 years ago when I retired from BA, I might have jumped at it,
but I have too many other things going on now + I’m 8 years older!) Ends.
Non-Exec Board Member
UKFSC