“Air transport is one of the safest forms of travel. It is essential to improve that level of safety for the benefit of the European citizens.” EASA Annual Safety Review 2009 – Introduction.
ECA is committed to improving flight safety. Like IFALPA and our Member Associations, our fundamental priority and one of our core activities, is to work with everyone across our industry to achieve the ultimate goal of ‘commercial aviation, free from fatal accidents’. Indeed European industry has been quite successful; even if you flew every day aboard a commercial aeroplane registered in one of the 31 EASA member states, it is only after nearly 7000 years that your chance of being involved in a fatal accident rises above 50%. And even then your chance of surviving that accident is still better than 50%. This is one way of describing the current 3 year average fatal accident rate of 2 accidents per 10,000,000 flights on scheduled commercial air transport operations.
EASA also declares in its 2009 safety review that “It is essential to improve that level of safety.” – although with that aim they are not yet being successful. Indeed that 3 year average fatal accident rate for aeroplanes has not improved since 2004 and has even started to edge upwards in the last couple of years. With helicopters the picture is no better. The rate is much higher and despite a halving of the 3 year average rate of fatal accidents in the second half of the last 10 years, this only brings us back to the rate which we had achieved at the beginning of the 10 year period!
Given EASA’s name (European Aviation Safety Agency), tagline (Your Safety is our mission) and the EASA website home page declaration that they are “The centrepiece of the European Union's strategy for aviation safety”, their statistics show that they cannot yet claim success. However, we are growing ever more worried that EASA may fail to improve the level of aviation safety in Europe for a number of reasons:
- The vast majority of EASA’s rulemaking tasks, as reported in their safety review, are technical or equipment related, despite this being a factor in a minority of fatal accidents.
- EASA continues to allow the drift towards weaker, non-binding regulation. This will allow a downward spiral of standards as different Member State Authorities permit individual variations to the rules, which are then usable across the continent
- The UK has developed the largest and broadest commercial aviation sector in the EU with scientifically derived, high quality fatigue protection regulations. EASA should not allow the airline associations to block the rest of the EU from benefiting from the same high level of protection. There are signs emerging from the drafting group on the review of crew fatigue regulations which indicate that EASA is not insisting that commercial questions are given a lower priority that the protection of the public and passengers from the effects of fatigue in flight crews.
