Victor Tan, Director (Air Navigation Services Safety), Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore, said there is a “triple convergence” of factors reshaping the air traffic control operational landscape: the rapid modernisation of air traffic management systems; the introduction of “new toys and technology” for air traffic controllers to use; and increases in traffic volume and complexity in the same airspace.

Cai Qi, Chief Flight Safety Officer, China Southern Airlines, said SMS must be optimised for maximum efficiency, that operations are getting more complex, and that SMS is expanding into more operations. He said safety and efficiency should coexist.

Benjamin 'Jay' R. Lopez, President, INAEC Aviation Corp., said that safety is not achieved in isolation, which is why his organisation shares lessons learned and collaborates with other stakeholders. “Every voice matters in preventing the next incident,” he said.

Akbar Sultan, Director Airspace Operations and Safety Program, U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), participating in the panel discussion remotely, talked about in-time aviation SMS (IASMS) and how transformation is needed to accommodate future operations. Those operations range from low-altitude small uncrewed aircraft systems and advanced air mobility to supersonic aircraft operating at Mach 1.5 and sharing the same higher altitudes (50,000 feet) with vehicles operating at just 15 knots. 

The current method of relying on a human-centric approach for the provision of separation and safety services limits scalability, he said.

“We have to approach safety in a more prognostic and predictive way, using data and analytics,” he said. The old way of learning from accidents and incidents and then introducing new regulations and processing will not be sufficient, he said. 

Safety management continues evolve and must be fit for purpose, Bongi Mtlokwa, Chairperson of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Safety Management Panel and Aviation Safety Technical Officer, South Africa Civil Aviation Authority, said during a fireside chat on state safety programs (SSP) and national aviation safety plans (NASP) with Alan Foo, Deputy Director-General, Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore.

“We’ve come a long way,” Mtlokwa said in describing ICAO’s safety management journey. Amendment 2 to Annex 19 recently was adopted and the Safety Management Panel is already looking at Amendment 3. The panel is working on evolving risk management concepts. The current version has a simplistic approach and is no longer fit for purpose when it comes to the current complex operating environment, she said, adding that ICAO is looking integrated risk management.

In discussing Singapore’s SSP journey, Foo said a key moment was the realisation that the motivation to look at your risks comes from within and not because ICAO asks you to do that. He also talked about the need to bring nontraditional skill sets into safety, such as data collection and fusion. “We need people with the right kinds of skills and people who are used to dealing with large datasets.”

Diego Albert, Director of APAC Sales, AIREON, said there were more than 12,000 events during a recent two-week period in which GPS signals were lost in the airspace near Myanmar. According to John Moore, Assistant Director–Flight and Technical Operations, Safety & Security, Asia-Pacific, International Air Transport Association, said that flights from Europe to Southeast Asia “are pretty much guaranteed” to lose GPS during flight, sometimes as many three times.

Panelists said that the GNSS interference in most cases is a side effect of electronic warfare near conflict zones and that civilian aviation is not the primary target.

The panelists agreed that the issue will eventually be resolved with technical solutions, but that the industry is not there yet. In the meantime, it is important to raise awareness of the issue. The avionics industry is working hard to provide the next generation of more resilient avionics systems, but for the next 18 to 24 months, the strategy is to mitigate the issue through containment.

sources, including pilot reports, to inform stakeholders of weather risks. FAA holds eight webinars a day to keep users of the U.S. National Airspace System apprised of weather and other possible operational risks.

David Zwegers, Executive Director Global Safety Strategy, The Boeing Company, and moderator of the panel, said airliners are an accurate atmospheric sensing platform. He also said that collected data is used for ongoing research in the aviation and scientific communities.

Shane Ngai, Senior Manager, Safety, International Air Transport Association (IATA), discussed IATA’s Turbulence Aware initiative, which he described as a safety information exchange platform. He said it is a possible real-time information exchange solution.

Creating a balanced security ecosystem to mitigate growing cybersecurity threats requires aligning human and technological defenses, according to Stephen Creamer, President and CEO of the Air Traffic Control Association (ATCA), and former Director, Air Navigation Bureau, International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).

Creamer said four critical threat vectors impact aviation: data breaches, supply chain issues, system interconnection, and global navigation satellite system (GNSS) spoofing. Combating cyber threats requires around-the-clock monitoring, the use of AI-powered tools, and cross-border sharing of information, he said.

When it comes to creating a balanced security ecosystem, the human element requires a security awareness culture, role-specific training programs, regular threat briefings and updates, incident response team readiness, and cross functional collaboration, Creamer said. Technological elements include artificial intelligence (AI)-powered threat detection systems, multi-factor authentication, real-time monitoring dashboards, and predictive vulnerability analysis. “If you’re not using AI and machine learning, you’re behind the power curve,” he said.