30th November, 2017
The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) and its global runway safety partners have agree on a new Global Runway Safety Action Plan to address civil aviation’s safety risks.
Dr Fang Liu, ICAO’s Secretary-General, had disclosed this on Thursday in a statement.
Liu said runway safety had been a global aviation priority for more than 15 years.
She said the new action plan was an important outcome of the detailed analysis of runway risk factors recently undertaken by ICAO.
Liu, however, said runway accident related fatalities had declined significantly in recent years through ICAO’s collaborative Runway Safety Programme with its stakeholders.
According to her, such collaborative efforts include the establishment of Runway Safety Teams across airports.
She said runway accidents still remained aviation’s number one safety risk category.
“The new Action Plan agreed at 2017 ICAO Symposium will serve to guide the integrated activities of states, airports, airlines, ANSPs and manufacturers to implement runway safety improvement and risk reduction measures.
“The overall objective is about reducing runway safety related accident fatalities and costs.
“Regardless of the success achieved thus far, the numbers still reveal for us that we have more work to do to fully mitigate runway-related risks.
“That helps explain why ICAO has brought the world’s runway safety specialists here to Lima this week for our second Global Runway Safety Symposium.
“And we are encouraged by the outcome of this new Action Plan which will drive improved runway safety risk mitigation over the next five years,’’ she said.
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Liu also said the Action Plan targeted and timelines had been developed to support the runway safety targets already established under ICAO’s Global Aviation Safety Plan.
She added that aviation safety specialists all over the world were currently looking into the plan as a high-level strategic tool to help align international actions and initiatives to avoid duplication of efforts.
According to her, an additional and related development announced at the Lima Symposium includes EUROCONTROL’s launch of its revised European Action Plan for the Prevention of Runway Incursions.
“The 2017 ICAO Global Runway Safety Symposium was hosted by the Ministry of Transport and Communications, and the Directorate General of Civil Aviation of Peru.
“It enjoyed the participation of global runway safety experts from Member States and many international organizations and industry groups,” she said.