Safety is the aim of any aviation players, for this reason, the matter is more and more regulated and subject to continuous updating of technical standards, guidelines and European laws. This activity helps to empower the Organizations and is useful to support women and men who every daily provide safety?

We have witnessed in the past years a shift towards a significant increase of ATM safety regulations and this is pushing the industry to become a "compliance" industry rather one that is striving to develop and adopt best practices beyond the minimum required by regulations. Translating the safety regulatory requirements to something meaningful for operators (controllers, pilots and engineers) that are safeguarding the day to day operations is not always straight forward. This may impact how they perceive their safety accountabilities and responsibilities. 

In Europe every ANS Provider has a Safety Management System. Your experience confirms that the management of safety is intended to support the Air Traffic Controllers and in general all safety related activities?

Indeed all the European ANSPs can claim today a Safety Management System(SMS) with various levels of maturity. The increase of the ATM complexity makes the SMS the tool to manage safety in a formal way. Ad-hoc approaches of the past are no longer fit for purpose.  SMS is also the tool to ensure the interface of the ANSPs with their NSAs. From my experience of the past 10 years in supporting ANSPs in implementing and improving SMS the answer is definitely yes - SMS is there to support the Air Traffic Controllers if the processes are adequately linked with the operational service delivery and if are kept simple. The only successful SMSs are those that are linked to operations, everything else are just paper exercises that sit nicely on shelves. 

What added value can be developed approaching the Safety from the FAB point of view? 

From my point of view one of the main added values of FABs in respect of safety and safety management is sharing the scarce resources. We have less and less safety experts with a greater demand. The most advanced ANSPs can play the role of a coach and support the development of less advanced ANSPs inside FABs. Knowing ENAV safety and operational people for years, I see a great role for ENAV to play in BLUEMED. 

Safety is Paramount and has an incalculable value, but it will be possible to quantify the direct and indirect "costs & income" for an ANSP? 

It is very difficult to put a price tag on safety - other industries e.g. railways that are measuring their level of performance only through amount of fatalities they produce, have a price for every victim ( 2 Mil EUR/victim). Aviation and ATM industry have a very different philosophy. We have developed in EUROCONTROL a Cost model for SMS but that allows you to just adequately size and calibrate your SMS costs (1-3% of the costs of an ANSP). We are further testing few ideas through a new tool called - Aerospace Performance Factor (APF) to allow ANSPs decision makers to prioritise the risks and make their investments in the area of greater risks and monitor if by mitigating the main contributory factors the risks levels are reducing. Conversely with the new Safety - II (positive safety) approach we should also look at maximising what we do well so as to minimise the adverse outcomes. I am very pleased to see that ENAV is one of the 8 ANSPs that are validating these days the new APF innovative ideas (together with NATS, DSNA, Austrocontrol, AVINOR, AENA, ROMATSA and NAV - Portugal).

Aircraft Operators and Pilots have always been accustomed to automatic detection, reporting, storage, and reporting system both for the cockpit and for all aircraft parameters. Automatic registration system for ATM and direct recording of the operational rooms may be an unavoidable necessity. ANSPs and its own staff are ready for this eventuality? 

 Not many ANSPs are ready to accept an automatic safety monitoring system. I will not be surprised, though to see such systems mandated in the RP3 by European Commission and the Performance Review Board. Introduction of such systems however need to have a solid foundation where by the right policies and just culture principles are achieved before their arrival within ANSPs premises. We need to be clear from day one that what is their purpose and how they will be used. In my team we are using ENAV safety policy on the usage of the EUROCONTROL AMST (Automatic Safety Monitoring Tool) as an example of best practice when we visit other ANSPs. Such a tool can have only a systemic usage and not an individual and punishment driven philosophy. I would advise any ANSP that will try to implement an AMST alike tool to supervise if they have the right amount of human reporting to abandon that idea. ASMT is a system improvement tool not a Big brother.

The basic legal framework is still very different in the various across the Europe, wherever Safety Policy, Just Culture Policy and Safety Management System are increasingly uniform in all ANSPs. The different consequences of a judiciary investigation it is still an obstacle to the safety reporting in ATM?  

Judicial proceedings in the aftermath of an accident or an incident can impede investigatory access to information sources, and in the same time people may become less willing to cooperate in the investigation probe. This could make it more difficult for investigators to obtain valuable information, particularly when judicial proceedings are launched at the same time as the safety investigation. In the long term the fear of retribution both by judiciary and corporate can become a major obstacle in reporting. The professionals will be reluctant to put forward a report if the perception of disciplinary and retribution is within the culture of the State, industry and at the place of work. We need the right culture i.e. the just culture.We should draw a distinctive line between accidents (involving victims) and simple occurrences where no life was in danger. While Just Culture would be applicable to both, the practice shows that is much easier implemented in the latter case. Intervention of the department of justice and prosecution in the case of accidentsis to be expected also due to political, public, media, victims and their relatives' pressure.Many misunderstandings of the pasts were born from the fact that aviation and judiciary have never talk to each other - just culture can only be born from the dialogue, education and interaction from aviation and administration of justice. I am very pleased that together with IFATCA and ECA we have started in EUROCONTROL an initiative where the two worlds - avaiation and justice - meet together and discuss how both can contribute to aviation safety. Is still early days but the good news is that Italian judiciary is actively participating and the public prosecutors and judges from Italy that I met they are becoming ambassadors of Just Culture. Italian UK and The Netherlands judiciary are helping EUROCONTROL in promoting just culture in a European roadshow - this would have seemed something totally impossible years ago.