Shaping the Future: Safety, Trust, and Global Growth
Day 3 of IASS 2025 highlighted aviation’s role in global development and the need for collaboration to keep pace with change. Speakers explored SMS maturity, human performance, new technologies, and emerging threats — reinforcing that safety and trust depend on shared accountability and innovation.
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Aviation is a developmental imperative for the African continent and a shared agenda for growth, Adefunke Adeyemi, secretary general of the African Civil Aviation Commission (AFCAC) and a new member of the Foundation Board of Governors, said Thursday in her Day 3 keynote address.
During her remarks, Adeyemi talked about the Single African Air Transport Market (SAATM) initiative, which she said “operationalizes” the African Union’s vision. Liberalization of the African market, forecast to be second-fastest growing world region over the next few decades, will help unlock access to the continent and break down barriers to create seamless air connectivity.
Safety is essential because it unlocks trust and helps build confidence in the system, she said. That confidence is reinforced by rigorous standards and oversight that meets international benchmarks, she said.
Looking more specifically at safety issues, the top five accident types in Africa over the past decade are runway excursions, loss of control–in flight, controlled flight into terrain, abnormal runway contact, system component failure–non-powerplant, particularly landing gear issues, and maintenance problems.
African stakeholders are focused on reducing the top accident causes as well as addressing such as issues as inadequate regulatory oversight and infrastructure deficiencies. “We want tangible results; we don’t want to just keep talking about the problems,” Adeyemi said.
The aviation industry needs to stop thinking about the safety management system (SMS) as an isolated system and look at it more as organizational safety management, multiple speakers said Thursday morning during the panel discussion on advancing SMS maturity. “We need to shift into systems thinking and away from a mechanistic approach,” said Hector Hidalgo Medellin, LGQS Managing Director/LAT Senior Manger Quality, Safety and Compliance, Lufthansa Group Quality Services.
Steve Hough, managing principal consultant, Baines Simmons, said one of the main characteristics of a mature SMS is confidence, such as confidence that risk controls are working. In addition, a regulator needs confidence that an organization’s SMS is working and that everything is under control, he said. Hough also stressed the need to continue developing an SMS. “Without continuous improvement, our SMS can actually degrade,” he said.
Hough, Hildalgo, and John Babcock, director, Flight Operations – Safety and Quality Management, United Airlines, painted a picture of an SMS that is less about dashboards and key performance indicators that are reported up to the executive level of an organization and more like a safety dialogue in which management can query the SMS for a better view of what’s going on in an organization and frontline workers can clearly see the data-based reasons for changes in policies and processes.
LATAM group announces plan to boost connectivity in South America with the Embraer E195-E2
LATAM Group has announced a major agreement with Embraer for up to 74 E195-E2 small narrowbody aircraft, comprising 24 firm orders and 50 purchase options.
The strategic move aims to boost LATAM’s connectivity across South America, leveraging the E195-E2's efficiency and economics to expand its network and add new destinations. With deliveries set to begin in the second half of 2026, the partnership reinforces Embraer's market leadership and underpins LATAM's strategy for profitable growth in the region.
One of the key technological enablers for safely integrating advanced aerial vehicles into the airspace and taking advantage of their potential will be finding new ways to use the existing radio spectrum, according to Michelle Bishop, Director, Programs, CANSO. “Our need for air-ground data exchange is growing,” she said. “We need more spectrum, but we’re not going to get it.”
Instead, the industry is looking at ways to more efficiently use the existing spectrum and to possibly use the public spectrum. Normally, the industry would be hesitant to use the public spectrum for safety-critical communications, but it is looking at new ways to exchange data, she said.
When responding to a question about what single technological breakthrough is needed, Ben Ivers, Autonomous Systems Global Safety and Regulatory Affairs, Boeing, said a lot of the necessary technology is approaching maturity and that “at the end of the day, it needs to be woven together in a common operating system. We need to make sure we have systems that talk to each other.”
Matt McCardle, Head of Global Infrastructure, Expansion, and Regulatory, Amazon Prime Air, and the other panelists also referenced the need for the harmonization of rules in different regions of the world. “There’s not a lot of harmonization between us [the United States] and Europe,” McCardle lamented. He said he considers the approach taken by the European Union Aviation Safety Agency to be very reasonable, but “FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] had to go its own way and do Part 108, which only looks at ground risk.”
Language and communication factors have an impact on aviation safety but often are not approached or reported in a standardized way, unlike other human factors, Dr. Markus Bieswanger, professor and researcher, University of Bayreuth, Germany, and Dr. Flavio Antonio Coimbra Mendonca, associate professor and researcher, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, said in a joint flash talk.
Language impacts safety in many ways, they said. It’s a factor in radiotelephony, crew resource management, reading and comprehending manuals, and understanding training that is delivered in English. “Even sharing a native language doesn’t guarantee communications,” Bieswanger said.
Language factors can be more clearly identified with the help of insights from applied linguistics and can be improved when they are systematically approached and included in the findings of investigations, he concluded.
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Regulators are facing significant challenges when it comes to integrating new technologies such as uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) and advanced air mobility (AAM) aircraft into the existing aviation system, a panel of regulators said Thursday afternoon. This integration is requiring civil aviation authorities to develop new risk appetites (outlines of what they consider an acceptable level of risk), new collaboration methods, and new types of expertise to oversee operations that lack historical safety data, they said.
In a wide-ranging discussion, the panelists, led by moderator Alan Foo, deputy director-general of the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS), outlined challenges facing regulators in a rapidly evolving industry. Giancarlo Bouno, Group Director Safety and Airspace Regulation, U.K. CAA, said his government wants regulators to be enablers in addition to regulators, protecting the public and creating a supportive environment in which new entrants can grow and scale business models.
Bouno and Gérson Costa, Safety Promotion and Continuous Improvement Coordinator, Brazilian National Civil Aviation Agency (ANAC), had different perspectives on data. Buono said the U.K. CAA went from having access to the safety data of 28 European states to data from just one state after the United Kingdon left the European Union. The U.K. CAA is now looking at alternative ways to access data, including through international cooperation.
Costa, on the other hand, said, “We have so much data we don’t know what to do with it. We’re asking ourselves, ‘Are we asking the right questions?’” and are we looking at the data in the right way, he said. “Having data is not the issue; dealing with the data is the question.”
Foo said that as a CAA, “we have a lot of data, but it’s nothing compared to what the industry has. We need to get richer data.”
Overall, the panelists, including Raymond Bisse Bell, Director of Aviation Safety, Cameroon Civil Aviation Authority (CCAA), concluded that there is a need to deepen collaboration with industry to build trust, which involves moving beyond consultation to actively involving stakeholders in the development of policies and the strategic processes of state safety programs.
TAP Air Portugal colleagues Catarina Moitinho, safety data integration engineer, and Capt. Luís Xavier, flight safety officer, outlined the approach they took to researching turbulence events occurring on TAP’s North Atlantic routes. The project compared the reported turbulence encounters of the carrier’s Airbus A330s and its A321LRs. The project showed there was a higher rate of turbulence reports on the A321LRs because the two aircraft types have different aerodynamic properties and because the narrowbodies cruise at lower altitudes and are exposed to more convective weather. The study used eddy dissipation rate data as an objective metric to strengthen the ability to detect and respond to turbulence threats.
Jamming causes receivers to die; spoofing causes the receiver to lie, Muna Alnadaf, Technical Officer CNSS, ICAO, said in summing up the difference between GNSS jamming and spoofing.
According to Mike McDowell, Director, Avionics Strategy, Collins Aerospace, GNSS jamming and spoofing happens all over the world. Knowing interference is happening enables operators to make smarter decisions, he said.
He said that jamming and spoofing come in many forms. Some interference is natural, and some is human made, some is unintentional and some is intentional. Unintentional interference can come from installing a satcom antenna incorrectly or from a nearby GPS repeater not set up property.
But often the interference is intentional, and it can impact navigation, communications, and downstream equipment such as TCAS and TAWS.
McDowell said that possible near-term mitigations include techniques to authenticate signals and anti-jam, multi-element antenna.
Alnadaf said that despite ICAO guidance, many states have not implemented GNSS radio frequency interference mitigation measures. “We need all states to work proactively on this. Don’t wait until you have an incident,” she said.
Balša Vujošević, staff officer, AIR Section, Defence Innovation Industry & Armaments, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), said NATO is working with many international organizations to address GNSS jamming and spoofing and that increasing civil and military coordination is essential.
McDowell said this is a global issue and needs global collaboration. He also said that regulatory organizations need to align with standards organizations to develop a solid roadmap to resolve the issue.