Wednesday Edition: AP-SAS 2026

Effective regulatory oversight of an organization’s safety management system (SMS) requires that inspectors have proper guidance, be trained to use it, and have an in-depth knowledge of the organization, Capt. Francesco Gaetani, flight standards director, European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) said Wednesday in kicking off Day 2 of the 4th annual Asia Pacific Summit for Aviation Safety in Osaka.

He also said that inspectors need to interview the right people and ask the right questions. “The inspector must understand what to check and how to check it,” Gaetani said, adding that if there are findings, both the regulator and the organization being inspected must understand the legal basis for those findings.

Gaetani’s advice to operators and other organizations was to keep their SMS simple and to build it on their explicit processes. “SMS is meant to support your business decisions,” he said, adding that the goal should be a working and sustainable SMS, not something as complex as rocket science. “SMS is a journey, so give it time to mature and deliver.”

Global navigation satellite system (GNSS) jamming and spoofing and cybersecurity are the two most critical elements in air traffic management (ATM) today, Stephen Creamer, president and CEO of the Air Traffic Control Association (ATCA), said during Wednesday’s panel discussion on building systemic resilience for safe management of disruptions.

“My concern is not about handling more volume, but about retaining trust and confidence in our system,” Creamer said, noting that GNSS radio frequency interference (RFI) and cyber-attacks directly impact that trust. “Trust in the data is the thing that worries me the most in terms of resilience. We have to have a way to regain that trust as soon as possible.”

Mr. Javier Serra Palerm, head of technical support and regional flight safety manager APAC, ATR, said that flight safety and resilience starts on the ground. It is important to follow OEM recommendations on maintenance, standard operating procedures, and minimum equipment lists, which he said are the basis of having a “known” aircraft.

Palerm also said it is important to provide oversight to third-party suppliers and ensure they have access to manufacturer recommendations, as well. “Are they aware of the proper tooling to be used?” he asked, noting that having landing gear damaged due to a towing incident could result in lengthy aircraft on ground (AOG) situations.

Hiroki Kitabayashi, deputy chief operating officer, Kansai Airports, discussed the changes implemented in the years since a major typhoon struck the region in 2018. At Kansai Airport (KIX), “we improved our infrastructure by raising the seawall and protecting our power facilities,” he said. Noting that passengers were stranded at the airport after the road to the facility was closed, Kansai now stores emergency provisions that could sustain thousands of people for three days and has created a crisis management group comprising dozens of stakeholders.

Koji Hayashi, vice president, MRO Japan, said that empowering human capital is the ultimate foundation of resilience.

Improving runway safety has to be a collaborative effort involving airlines, airports, air navigation service providers, and manufacturers, said Capt. Peter Clemmow, general manager - group safety and operational risk management, Cathay Pacific, adding that none of these stakeholders can solve the issue on their own.

When asked why more progress isn’t being made on improving runway safety, Clemmow said it comes down to collaboration. After a near runway incursion, he found out that the conditions that led to the event were known to various stakeholders, but they were not working together or communicating about the issue, so the situation went unresolved.

Nick Fuller, associate administrator for aviation safety management, with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), talked about some of the tools being used or tested to improve runway safety, including the Surface Awareness Initiative, a runway incursion device, approach runway verification, and artificial intelligence-driven fusion of different date sources.

Fuller agreed that collaboration is important, but he said commitment is, too. He said that FAA has made significant investments in building end-around taxiways at certain airports to cut down on potential conflicts, but that aircraft at those airports are still crossing runways midfield. Fuller lauded the current FAA leadership, saying, “In the past, we may have had leaders who tried to balance safety and efficiency,” but the current leaders are safety first and safety second, and then they may talk about efficiency.

Capt. Adrian Abraham, regional safety director, South-East Asia, Airbus, said that runway accidents are rare, but when they do occur, they are often fatal. Still, he said, many close calls “are falling below our radars.” In addition to technologies under development by Airbus and other companies, he encouraged those organizations to implement the recommendations contained in the Global Action Plan for the Prevention of Runway Incursions and the Global Action Plan for the Prevention of Runway Excursions. He also said it is important to work with tertiary airports where low-cost carriers are providing service to make sure they are up to speed on runway safety initiatives.

Duangtawan Pinpimai, expert, director level, safety management department, AEROTHAI, said that many runway safety issues can be traced to training. For instance, it takes time to reach down into an organization to get to all the vehicle drivers. She also said that implementing improvements can be difficult and that it is important to try to get frontline people involved.

Capt. Nurcahyo Utomo, director of safety, security and standardization, Air Nav Indonesia, said that “no single actor holds the entire picture.”

Incidences of severe clear air turbulence have increased more than 50 percent in some regions in the past 40 years, Maya Shpak, CEO of SkyPath, said during a wide-ranging panel discussion on strategies for mitigating turbulence and weather-related hazards.

“Weather has always been one of aviation’s most challenging variables,’’ said Todd Sigler, senior director, global safety and regulatory affairs, The Boeing Company, who moderated the discussion. “Weather is dynamic, fast changing, and beyond our control; yet it affects all aspects of our industry and its operation.”

Shpak said that turbulence is the leading cause of nonfatal injuries to passengers and crew and that nearly 80 percent of turbulence injuries occur in known turbulence areas. But due to technology, turbulence is no longer a weather problem an airline needs to brace for, but a data problem, and as such, it’s measurable, hence manageable, she said.

Hyson Su, junior vice president, corporate safety, security and quality division, EVA Airways, said turbulence safety should not be merely reactive, but that it must be proactive and increasingly predictive. He said that in addition to educating passengers on turbulence risks and injury prevention, his carrier is looking at fusing satellite imagery and flight data to better understand turbulence risk.

He also said that cabin crew at EVA have been empowered to suspend cabin service on their own if they believe turbulence is a safety issue.

Capt. Max Matsumoto, safety general manager and a pilot at All Nippon Airways, said that pilots have to be more specific when briefing flight attendants about turbulence risk. He also said that new turbulence tools for pilots should not require use of another app. “We already have enough apps; we don’t want to open another one.

Shpak and others also said that overuse of the seat belt sign can be an issue, because then passengers tend to ignore it. “If the seat belt sign is not trustworthy, they won’t listen to it,” she said. “We need to create the notion that if you turn on the seat belt sign, it is needed.”

Sigler said that providing flight crews with more information is not the goal; providing them with actionable intelligence is the key.

If the aviation industry learns only from the rare times when accidents occur, it learns only rarely, but if it learns from everyday operations, it can learn every day, according to Dr. Kristy Kiernan, associate professor, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.

Because the vast majority of aviation operations end successfully, it is important to learn from those operations. If the industry only learns from accidents, it is leaning from a small subset of non-representative data, she said.

Practical tools in use at airlines to enable learning from all operations include:

Operational learning reviews;
Observations of actual work;
Shorter worker surveys;
Shop talk conversations;
Flight replay tools; and,
Research partnerships.

Humans intervene to manage aircraft malfunctions 157,000 times for every time human error causes an accident. “We need to study error, and we also need to study performance that builds safety,” she said.